Sympoesia — London Sinfonietta and Out-Spoken Weave Poetry and Music
Jay Bernard, Salena Godden, Anthony Anaxagorou, and Joelle Taylor join the London Sinfonietta for an urgent evening of poetry woven through contemporary orchestral music.
Why we picked this
Merging Out-Spoken's most urgent poets with the London Sinfonietta's contemporary chamber ensemble makes for something rarer than a concert and more demanding than a poetry reading — it is an argument about form as much as content.
Out-Spoken is the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night — monthly, reliably excellent, reliably packed. The London Sinfonietta is one of the finest contemporary chamber orchestras in the world, known for commissioning and performing work that treats music as a medium for ideas rather than just sound. Sympoesia brings them together in a single evening that takes the question of how words and music coexist and pushes it as far as it can go.
The poets — Jay Bernard, Salena Godden, Anthony Anaxagorou, and Out-Spoken’s founder Joelle Taylor — are among the most distinctive voices in contemporary British poetry. Bernard’s work is rooted in sound, social history, and the archive; Godden is an award-winning author and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage whose poetry has a musical grain even on the page; Anaxagorou and Taylor are both practitioners who have built careers at the intersection of verse and performance. The programme pairs them with works by Thomas Adès, Messiaen, Courtney Bryan, Steve Reich, and Max Richter — a lineup that spans minimalism, sacred music, and new composition.
A brand-new commission sits at the heart of the evening. The result is approximately ninety minutes of what the organizers call “urgent storytelling and virtuosic performance” — which, in this combination, is likely to be exactly that.