Published: 09 June 2011
Category: Artists

In June, Baldur Brönnimann returns to the Southbank Centre to conduct the London Sinfonietta in the Meltdown festival, which is curated this year by Ray Davies, lead singer and rhythm guitarist with The Kinks, as well as solo artist, actor, director and storyteller.

This concert, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on June 16, features music by two of the UK’s most iconic living composers: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. Leigh Melrose joins Brönnimann and the London Sinfonietta to sing Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, requiring a phenomenal technique with a part that spans five octaves, and in the first half Brönnimann conducts works by Birtwistle. These two composers were contemporaries in the 1950s at what is now the Royal Northern College of Music; Baldur Brönnimann also trained at the RNCM in Manchester, where he was a Junior Fellow and Visiting Tutor in Conducting.

Brönnimann returns to the Southbank Centre on June 23 to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in the final concert of their 2010/11 Music of Today series at the Royal Festival Hall. They will perform György Kurtág’s Messages of the late Miss RV Troussova with soprano Susan Narucki.

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