Still Life

Sunday 21 June 2026, 4.30pm

CBSO Centre, Birmingham

Tickets: £18 | Students £9 | Under 12s FREE with a paying adult

Pre-concert talk at 3.30pm

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BCMG’s summer programme explores the contrasts and crossings between rural and urban life.

Katherine Balch’s still life, a Sound Investment commission, creates a vivid, multi-movement ‘sonic ecosystem’. Blending ensemble, field recordings and video into an immersive portrait of her Connecticut homestead, we hear insects at dusk, spring deluges, ruminants and birdsong transformed into delicately hybrid soundscapes.

Where Balch listens outward to the land, George Lewis’s …and other spirits, a Sound Investment commission, searches inward, channelling energies of instability and resistance. A companion to his earlier BCMG commission Breaking, the new work carries Lewis’s urgent reflections on struggle, agency and the fragile architectures of contemporary life.

Framing these premieres are Elliott Carter’s bright, propulsive ASKO Concerto and Charlotte Bray’s shimmering Reflections in Time, completing a programme alive with shifting landscapes, real and imagined.

Artists

Ted Moore Video and Sound Designer

Clement Power Conductor

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Programme

Charlotte Bray (b. 1982): Reflections in Time, 11′ (2018)

Elliott Carter (1908–2012): ASKO Concerto, 12′ (2000)

George Lewis (b. 1952): …and other spirits, 16′ (2025–26) Sound Investment UK Premiere

INTERVAL

Katherine Balch (b. 1991): still life, 28′ (2026) Sound Investment UK Premiere

still life is a Sound Investment co-commission with Talea Ensemble and is made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation. …and other spirits is a Sound Investment co-commission with Grossman Ensemble. This project is supported by The Amphion Foundation and the PRS Foundation's Resonate fund.

Want to get involved? 

Our wonderful supporters mean we can commission more pieces like still life and …and other spirits. We say thank you by naming them in the score, inviting them to rehearsals, and the world première, where they can meet the composer.

For more info visit www.bcmg.org.uk/sound-investment. You can support a piece as a one-off through Sound Investment or give monthly through Sound Investment Monthly.

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