City of London Sinfonia looks to the skies with celestial new season

City of London Sinfonia (CLS) has today revealed details of its upcoming season, centred around the theme of ‘new frontiers’. The season also marks the launch of Music and…, a five-year project focusing on CLS’ collaborations with creatives and their storytelling potential.

The new project is led by CLS’ creative director and orchestra leader Alexandra Wood, and aims to put musicians at the heart of the creative process, shaping music from beginning to end. Public booking for City of London Sinfonia’s upcoming 2025-26 season opens on Friday (30 May).

CLS chief executive officer Rowan Rutter said: ‘With CLS’ 60th anniversary on the horizon, we are using the next five years to evolve our approach to music-making, embedding human connection and collaborative creation at our core. We believe that relevance and inclusion is vital to the future of our artform, and Music and… is our commitment to explore, investigate, listen, challenge, and learn from different points of view, different people, different experiences, and cultures. We’ll be working alongside communities, scientists, theatre-makers, writers and poets to reimagine what orchestral storytelling can be, both revisiting older works and commissioning new work – like THE EXOPLANETS – as well as integrating our award-winning participation programmes into our concert performances.’

The season will kick off on 6 September with the world premiere of THE EXOPLANETS, a production combining theatre from curious directive with orchestral music from CLS. CLS has brought together seven composers – Samantha Fernando, Robin Haigh, Blasio Kavuma, Zhenyan Li, Pauchi Sasaki, Anibal Vidal, and Theo Whitworth – to work with scientists, musicians and theatre-makers to create a ‘brand new kind of orchestral suite’ exploring our changing understanding of the Universe and our place within it.

This will be followed by New Frontiers: Explorers, which combines excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Hannah Kendall’s Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama, Gabriela Ortíz’s Kauyumari, with silver screen soundtracks from Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park, conducted by Chloe Rooke. New Frontiers: Trailblazers then turns its attention to musical pioneers, with Rebel’s Les élémens and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, ​led by CLS leader Alexandra Wood. New Frontiers: From Dusk ‘til Dawn is inspired by the night sky and its celestial bodies, presenting music from composer-astronomer William Herschel, Debussy, Brian Balmages, Charlotte Bray, Dobrinka Tabakova and Hannah Kendall.