Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble

The Manson Ensemble is the Royal Academy of Music’s specialist contemporary music ensemble. Its first concert was at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1968, and it plays regularly at the Academy and in festivals around the UK. The group has collaborated closely with student composers from the Academy as well as composers and performers from The Juilliard School, New York. Since its foundation, the ensemble has performed major works – in the presence of the composer – by Berio, Boulez, Carter, Donatoni, Henze, Kagel, György Kurtág, Lutosławski, Maxwell Davies, Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki and, in more recent years, with Hans Abrahamsen, George Benjamin, Harrison Birtwistle, Beat Furrer, Oliver Knussen, Magnus Lindberg, Andrew Norman, Bent Sørensen and Anna Thorvaldsdottir.

Other highlights for the Manson Ensemble include performing and recording the music of Frank Zappa as part of a Roundhouse/Zappa Family Trust festival; the world premiere of Daniel Cohen’s The Pleasure Garden (a new score written for Alfred Hitchcock’s first silent film of the same name) in association with the British Film Institute; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beyond the Score – A Pierre Dream with Susanna Mälkki at the Aldeburgh Festival.

A major series of SIDE BY SIDE projects with the London Sinfonietta began in 2002 with György Kurtág’s Double Concerto and has been followed by significant performances, including the UK premieres of Nono’s Prometeo and Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques. Recent collaborations have included Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Hymnen and Donnerstag aus Licht, Morton Feldman’s For Samuel Beckett, Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days, Claude Vivier’s Zipangu and Lonely Child and a programme of music by Harrison Birtwistle conducted by Martyn Brabbins.