Frederick Waxman

MOURN: Figure, Alkanna Graeca

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

MOURN
Figure, Alkanna Graeca
Frederick Waxman, Alexandra Achillea
Stone Nest. 17 April 2026

Event promotional photo: “Nyx (the night),” 2019 by Ioanna Sakellaraki

Stone Nest is not a typical early classical music venue, and this wasn’t a typical early classical music concert. A former Welsh Presbyterian church, since 1982 it has been a nightclub, a pub, a squat, and, since 2012, a new (work in progress) home for performing arts in central London. The smoke-filled space prevented me from appreciating the architecture of the internal space, but gave a clue as to the nature of the performance to come. That was a joint production between Frederick Waxman’s “forward-thinking” historical performance ensemble, Figure, who are “committed to reaching new and existing audiences through immersive musical experiences”, and the three singers of Alkanna Graeca, specialists in polyphonic music from the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea, blending “raw folk traditions with soundscapes and improvised sounds”. Their programme brought together these seemingly disparate strands in an extraordinary musical-theatrical exploration of the experience of loss, imaginatively staged by Alkanna Graeca’s Alexandra Achillea‍ and Konstantina-Maria Spyropoulou‍, with musical direction by Frederick Waxman.

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This is my Body – Membra Jesu Nostri

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

This is my body
Buxtehude Membra Jesu Nostri
Figure Ensemble, Frederick Waxman
The Swiss Church, Covent Garden. 15th March 2023


The “forward-thinking historical performance ensemble” Figure gave their impressive thought-provoking interpretation of Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 sequence of seven cantata meditations on the body of Christ, Membra Jesu Nostri. They described this as “an immersive, surround-sound performance” which allows the audience to “experience every emotion up close and stand within the Passion scene – in the body of the sound”. The sparse white-washed of the acoustically lively Swiss Church provided the perfect venue. Apart from a few chairs around the edge of the empty space, the audience stood in a space surrounded by four stages and a central platform. The seven instrumentalists were in the apse at the business end of the church. The five singers moved around the space, singing from the five platforms in various groupings. On one side wall was a projection of the texts in English while the other showed evolving drawings based on a statue that survives from Buxtehude’s time in Lübeck’s Marienkirche.

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