Naomi Burrell

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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Mozart in Italy Festival

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson

Mozart in Italy Festival
The Mozartists, Ian Page
Cadogan Hall, 6-8 March 2020

The Mozartists (and their companions, Classical Opera) continue with their ambitious MOZART 250 project with a weekend exploration of music written by Mozart and others in the year 1770 when he was 14 years old. The project started in 2015 on the anniversary of Mozart’s childhood visit to London and continues with annual explorations of the music that Mozart wrote exactly 250 years earlier, alongside music that Mozart might have heard during the same year. Following their 2015 ‘Mozart in London’ weekend, this weekend focussed on the time Mozart spent in Italy. The Cadogan Hall weekend included three formal concerts together with related talks and performances. There was a focus on different versions of Mitridate, re di Ponto, by Mozart and others, together with extracts from little-known operas by Guglielmi, Piccinni, Mysliveček and Jommelli that Mozart heard in Verona, Milan, Bologna and Naples. Continue reading →

Baroquestock: The Haydn Boys

~ Andrew Benson-Wilson ~ Leave a comment

 Baroquestock
IstanteClassical: The Haydn Boys
Heath Street Baptist Church. 28 April 2018

One of the most exciting music venues to hit London in recent years has been a rather unassuming Baptist church in Heath Street, Hampstead. Bowing to the inevitable, they have reduced their services to Sunday mornings, but have encouraged a wide variety of activities during the rest of the week, including lunchtime and evening concerts. In 2016  a complete weekend was devoted to the ‘Hampstead Baroque Festival’ which concluded in a Bratwurst, Beer & Bach concert given by the then newly-formed period-instrument collective Istante, ‘ensemble in residence’ at Heath Street Baptist Church. Last year, this festival morphed into the more imaginatively named Baroquestock. I reviewed the opening concert when they hosted one of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s ‘Night Shift’ events, aimed at just the sort of younger-than-usual classical music audience that Heath Street had already been attracting. In an imaginative, albeit brave bit of programming, the concert was devoted to a performance of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, complete with ‘Schoenbergers’. My review is here, noting that the “large and enthusiastic crowd was yet another indication that adventurous musical programming and providing something a little different from the normal run of musical events can draw the crowds”.

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