• The Royal Academy of Music announces its season of events for spring 2024, with over 60 concerts and 20 masterclasses.
• Resounding Shores, a new Sunday concert series at the Academy celebrating Purcell and the legacy of a golden age for music in England, launches in January.
• Renowned artists from across the world, including John Wilson, Bjarte Eike, Barbara Hannigan and Giacomo Smith, lead Academy students in a diverse range of projects.
• Royal Academy Opera presents Britten’s comic masterpiece, Albert Herring, in March.
• The Academy continues to collaborate with prestigious London venues Wigmore Hall and Southbank Centre, and partners with St John’s Smith Square for a new lunchtime concert series.
• General booking opens at 10am on Thursday 14 December.
• View all events on the Royal Academy of Music: https://ram.ac.uk/tickets

The Royal Academy of Music today announces its series of events for spring 2024. The season spans a wide range of musical styles and genres, from English music of the late Elizabethan era through to pioneering compositions of the 20th century and premieres of new works. With guest performances from some of the world’s leading artists, audiences can enjoy the talent and creativity of the Academy’s students in over 60 concerts, many of which are free to attend.

Following the Sunday series of Bach cantatas which has taken place over the past 15 years, the Academy is proud to launch Resounding Shores. This new concert series will give audiences a chance to experience the extraordinary range and depth of expression of Henry Purcell alongside the music of his forebears and contemporaries. Eamonn Dougan leads a welcome concert featuring music from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and John Blow’s Amphion anglicus (21 Jan), and for the second instalment in the series, innovative baroque violinist Bjarte Eike joins the Academy Baroque Soloists for a programme of music for the theatre and the alehouse (3 Mar). Further performances will be programmed throughout 2024.

The Academy continues its commitment to providing students with inspirational learning opportunities this season in welcoming the world’s leading artists to work on performance projects. John Wilson returns to conduct the Academy Symphony Orchestra in a programme featuring Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (9 Feb). Ryan Wigglesworth leads the Academy Chamber Orchestra in works by Nielsen (23 Feb) and Barbara Hannigan then takes charge for a programme of Haydn, Ligeti and Vivier (15 Mar) which will be recorded for a release on Linn Records in 2025.

Audiences can also see Academy students performing across London in the city’s prestigious venues. The Piano Series at Wigmore Hall continues this spring, in which the Academy’s extraordinary young pianists perform solo recitals; Verdan Janjanin presents a programme inspired by the fiery poetry of Scriabin, performed alongside works by celebrated Croatian composers (10 Jan); Yuzhang Li showcases Beethoven’s late, luminous A major sonata alongside the complete set of Op 23 Preludes by Rachmaninov (21 Feb); and Tracy Tang contrasts waltzes by Valentin Sylvestrov with Prokofiev’s celebrated ‘War Sonatas’ (13 Mar). Academy students will also perform SIDE-BY-SIDE with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall under the direction of alumnus Edward Gardner (3 Feb), and alongside the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall in a programme featuring world premieres of works by Mary Offer and Toby Anderson. Also at Wigmore Hall, the Academy Song Circle, a collection of the Vocal Studies and Opera departments’ most promising singers, presents a programme of Fauré, Liszt, Debussy and Vaughan-Williams (14 Jan). Furthermore, the Academy is excited to begin a new creative partnership with St John’s Smith Square, which will see students performing in lunchtime concerts at the venue across the year. This series begins with Fraser Gordon, Head of Woodwind, leading the Academy Wind Ensemble in an arrangement of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (29 Feb).

The spring term sees Royal Academy Opera present one of the great comic masterpieces of the 20th century: Britten’s Albert Herring. In a production directed by Orpha Phelan and conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, the next generation of opera stars bring the hysteria, claustrophobia and wonder of Britten’s beloved chamber opera to life (12-15 Mar).

The annual Students’ Create festival returns in January, in which students take over performance venues at the Academy from lunchtime into the evening over the course of three days. This year’s festival programme embraces an eclectic mix of concerts, staged events and video, showcasing the creativity and imagination of students from across all disciplines at the Academy (15-17 Jan).

There is also ample opportunity to hear students from the Academy’s Jazz department alongside renowned artists this spring: composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Giacomo Smith conducts the Academy Jazz Orchestra in a concert celebrating the centennial year of the great Thad Jones (31 Jan); the Academy Jazz Festival (14-15 Feb), now in its 10th year, sees our students perform with stars of the European Jazz scene Laura Jurd, Jim Hart and Kit Downes; and to celebrate International Women’s Day (8 March), leading jazz musicians Nikki Iles and Ingrid Jensen join the Academy Jazz Orchestra for a concert at London’s iconic Vortex Jazz Club.

Finally, the Academy looks forward to a range of public masterclasses this term, where audiences can see great artists sharing their musical expertise and knowledge with our students. Notable masterclasses include international dramatic soprano Susan Bullock (11 Jan), the BBC Singers (22 Jan), Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes (5 Feb), alumnus and Visiting Professor Sheku Kanneh-Mason (20 Feb) and Tony Award winning composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (20 Feb).

Since 1822 the Royal Academy of Music has been moving music forward by inspiring successive generations of musicians to connect, collaborate and create.

From pre-school to post-doc, our students come from more than 50 countries. Jacob Collier, Freddie De Tommaso, Elton John, Edward Gardner, Evelyn Glennie, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Lucy Crowe and Simon Rattle all learnt their craft at the Academy.

Every student benefits from a stimulating curriculum and an ambitious range of concerts and events. Legendary artists visit not just to perform, but to become mentors and musical partners.

As the Academy embarks on its third century, its aim is to shape the future of music by discovering and supporting talent wherever it exists.

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