An installation of 13 children’s dresses made from the fabric of discarded refugee lifejackets is part of a new programme of 450 concerts announced by Wigmore Hall today.
It is the first time that Wigmore Hall in London, home to the UK’s largest classical music concert programme, is showcasing an art installation alongside a specially written piece of music.
The music is a new string quartet by the British composer Charlotte Bray entitled Ungrievable Lives. The 13-movement quartet, a musical response to the migration crisis, will be presented in conjunction with the art installation by British artist Caroline Burraway. It consists of 13 children’s dresses, handmade from refugee lifejackets gathered by the artist at the “lifejacket graveyard” in Lesbos, Greece. The dresses hang from old iron and brass weighing hooks, above piles of sand. Each dress represents one million of the 13 million child refugees worldwide. The orange fabric represents the absent children and is Burraway’s way to evoke memory, absence and loss.
As part of the new programme, which runs from 1 September 2022-31 July 2023, 2,500 musicians from around the globe will perform 450 concerts. Among them are more than 40 premieres, including Ungrievable Lives.
Leading artists who feature in the new programme include Nitin Sawhney and cellists Steven Isserlis and Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Composers in focus include Cassandra Miller, Lera Auerbach, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Ferruccio Busoni. The 2022-23 concert year will see the African Concert Series make Wigmore Hall its London home.
Wigmore Hall is keen to make the programme accessible to the widest possible audience including young people and those on low incomes. There will be 25,000 tickets for £5 made available to people under 35, as well as thousands of free tickets for anyone under the age of 26 through Wigmore Hall’s partnership with the Cavatina Chamber Music Trust.
John Gilhooly, chief executive and artistic director of Wigmore Hall, welcomed the new programme. He said: “In times of great tumult, art and music provide precious moments of reflection, comfort and consolation. I hope Wigmore Hall continues to be a haven where audiences can experience the beauty and wisdom of great music from the most diverse possible origins. I am heartened that our £5 tickets for under 35s scheme has seen the highest ever take-up since the initiative was launched four years ago, bringing many thousands of new, young concertgoers to live performances this season.”
Bray said of the inspiration behind her new string quartet: “I attempt to imagine and find some way of illustrating what millions of migrants are enduring, in search of safety or a better life. Caroline Burraway has responded to the crisis through her art since 2015 and witnessed first-hand the camps and the situation in the Mediterranean up close. Her installation forms a large part of the stimulus behind my string quartet.”
Burraway described what inspired her to create the art installation fashioned from discarded refugee lifejackets: “As I stood at the edge of the chasm, it felt like a physical blow – below me mountains of discarded lifejackets, many metres deep, lay quietly abandoned, decaying, buried in the stillness of the surrounding valley. My feet sank into the depths below as I made my way through thousands of loudly shouting colours, each shape evoking the suffocating presence of an abandoned body. Straight away, I knew I needed somehow to bring a sense of this to those who neither would, nor could ever see it, never have the chance to feel it themselves.”
