Babel

Babel explores the concept of music that comes with a message; a selection of powerful pieces using music as a tool to communicate something that words could not.

At the heart of the concert is Gabriela Montero’s new commission for piano and string orchestra, a colourful and inventive portrait of her experience as human rights activist as she tries to be heard in a world which wants only to talk, not listen.

Montero’s voice is joined by others, from Barshai’s arrangement of Shostakovich’s tenth String Quartet – an honest, heartfelt illustration of his disillusionment with a crushing Soviet regime – to Messiaen’s astonishing invocation of heaven, written whilst a German prisoner of war.

Join us and witness the room fill with complex, deep and urgent messages, from the political to the philosophical, without a single word being uttered.