Voices Under Glass

Thursday 2 April 2026, 7.30pm

CBSO Centre, Birmingham

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

Pre-concert talk with Jack Sheen at 6.30pm

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Voices Under Glass invites listeners into music shaped by echoes, memory and the delicate traces of what remains.

The concert opens with Salvatore Sciarrino’s Le voci sottovetro, where fragments of madrigal appear as if sealed under glass, preserved yet unreachable. Jack Sheen’s own Television Continuity Poses is a poised, slow-moving ritual, while Rebecca Saunders’ Stirrings is a vivid exploration of breath, touch and resonance.

At the centre of this programme is Sciarrino’s Aspern Suite, drawn from his opera after Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. Sciarrino transforms the novella’s guarded secrets and vanished poetry into a sound world of whispered soprano lines, fragile colours  and shimmering stillness: a voice withheld, sought and ultimately lost.

Artists

Eleonore Cockerham Soprano

Darragh Morgan Violin

Jack Sheen Conductor

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Programme

Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947): Le voci sottovetro (1999) for mezzo-soprano and ensemble

Jack Sheen (b. 1993): Television Continuity Poses (2016, rev. 2021) for violin and ensemble

Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967): Stirrings (2011) for nine players

Salvatore Sciarrino: Aspern Suite (1979) for soprano and ensemble

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