The Inaugural London Festival of Chamber Music — Alive with Imagination, Immediacy and Excitement

When

25–29 March 2026

Where

Smith Square Hall, London

What

Three concerts:

25 March 2026  9.30pm

NIGHTFALL

Piano Alessio Bax & Lucille Chung | Violin Natalia Lomeiko | Viola Lawrence Power | Double bass Nabil Shehata | French horn Radovan Vlatković | Cello Paul Watkins

Schubert Andantino Varié

Messiaen Appel Interstellaire

Berio Psy

Berio Wasserklavier

Elgar Piano Quintet

27 March 2026  7pm

MYSTERIES

Violin Alena Baeva | Piano Alessio Bax | Viola Lawrence Power | Conductor and cello Paul Watkins | Sinfonia Smith Square

Beethoven Cello Sonata No. 2 in G minor

Mozart Concerto

Beethoven Concerto for violin, cello and piano

29 March 2026  7pm

SUNSET

Soprano Sarah Aristidou | Conductor and oboe François Leleux | Violin Alena Baeva & Natalia Lomeiko | Viola Lawrence Power | Conductor and cello Paul Watkins | Sinfonia Smith Square

Respighi Il Tramonto

Ligeti Mysteries of the Macabre

Pasculli Oboe Concerto on Themes from Donizetti’s La Favorita

Schubert Symphony No.5

Why

The first edition of London Festival of Chamber Music (LFCM)

Smith Square Photo: Wu Yiyao

Live Notes

Coming out of Westminster station, a five-minute walk south takes you into a neighbourhood most tourists never bother with. Along the way, Westminster Abbey — its twin western towers built by Hawksmoor in his later years — offers its pale limestone grey in quiet argument with the golden imperial grandeur of the Houses of Parliament to the left. If it happens to be raining in London, the contrast is even sharper. Walk a little further, turn through a few streets that grow quieter with each block, and Smith Square appears on your right. At its centre stands a four-square old church, completed in 1728, gutted by incendiary bombs in 1941, and left as a ruin for twenty years. Restored by private fundraising and reopened in 1969 — its inaugural recital given by soprano Joan Sutherland — it has since been one of London’s quieter but more important musical addresses.

In 2021, the hall merged with the young professional ensemble Southbank Sinfonia to become Sinfonia Smith Square, establishing a tradition of world-class guest artists performing alongside a new generation of players — a tradition that extends naturally into the framework of this festival. That the inaugural London Festival of Chamber Music chose to make its home here feels, in retrospect, like a statement of intent, however understated. London is not short of chamber music — Wigmore Hall, the Southbank Centre, the Barbican, venues large and small with seasons that fill to capacity. Into this landscape, Artistic Director Alessio Bax set out to do something different: to bring musicians together who could “reveal themselves in a new light — as a close-knit family of like-minded musicians who live and breathe the music together, rehearsing, exchanging ideas, experiencing London, and shaping programmes that exist nowhere else.”

LFCM's opening concert at Smith Square Hall © Sophie Oliver / Sinfonia Smith Square

The difficulty, however, is that the collaborative premise at the heart of this concept rests on an assumption worth examining. Assembling a group of individually accomplished soloists on the same stage does not in itself produce genuine collaborative creation — world-class performers will of course play well together at short notice, but that is not quite the same thing as the distinctive collective voice that emerges from long-term artistic partnership. This tension is equally present in the programming logic. Looking across the festival as a whole, the breadth of the repertoire is impressive, yet a coherent curatorial thread is difficult to identify. The closing concert, Sunset, offers a useful example: Respighi’s Il Tramonto, Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, Pasculli’s Oboe Concerto on themes from Donizetti’s La Favorita, and Schubert’s Fifth Symphony — four works of entirely different character, placed side by side within a single evening of two hours, presenting less as a coherent whole than as a showcase of the lineup’s range.

Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre is the weightiest of the four. Arranged from three coloratura arias in the opera Le Grand Macabre, the work may be modest in scale, but its vocal demands are anything but — the singer must navigate rapid-fire switches between absurdist, near-unintelligible text and extreme high-register coloratura, all within Ligeti’s constantly shifting metric language. Even in a programme of contemporary music, this is not an easy piece to programme or to perform. This makes Sarah Aristidou’s singing all the more remarkable: her command of the role, set against the middle-register vocal writing elsewhere in the same evening, was striking, and represented one of the festival’s moments of highest artistic achievement. And yet it is precisely here that the programming question becomes most acute. The distance between Mysteries of the Macabre and the Pasculli that follows it cannot simply be smoothed over by a warm atmosphere — these two works presuppose almost entirely different concert contexts, and placing them side by side demands a clearer curatorial logic than the evening’s mood alone can provide.

Sarah Aristidou (middle) © Sophie Oliver / Sinfonia Smith Square

Then there is the broader question that all classical music institutions are grappling with: how to make the form feel less forbidding. The festival invested considerable thought in audience engagement — inviting listeners onto the stage, repositioning performers around the hall, engineering moments of laughter and ease between the music. The response from the audience was genuinely warm, and the impulse is not without justification: the scholarly critique of classical music’s formality and exclusivity is a long one, and for a first-time listener, this kind of approach may well be the most effective point of entry — something to ease the stiffness, a permission to shift in one’s seat. And yet chamber music is, of all musical forms, already the most intimate — an intimacy that is, one might argue, created precisely by a certain quality of attention and stillness. When the music on stage is powerful enough to hold the room on its own terms, the question of whether external intervention is necessary becomes harder to avoid. How a concert hall and its performance environment can best serve both kinds of listener — those for whom the barriers need dismantling, and those for whom the music itself is sufficient — remains an open and genuinely interesting problem.

As an inaugural edition, the London Festival of Chamber Music has already demonstrated its reason for existing. Smith Square Hall’s classical temperament sits in natural affinity with the chamber music form; the roster of musicians Bax has assembled is difficult to match among comparable events in London; and the ambition to bring leading performers into a shared space and allow something to grow from that proximity is a genuinely worthwhile one. These are not small things. A festival's character often takes several editions to fully take shape, and what this first edition leaves behind is a beginning worth watching.