The Barbican Centre’s 2025-26 concert season, Fragile Earth: Sounds of a Living Planet, brings the connection between music and nature, and its vulnerability to climate change, to the fore.
The chamber orchestra Britten Sinfonia embraced the theme with their contribution, Nature and Rapture: Recycling Concerto, which took place on March 12 and 13. The concerto was written by Gregor A. Mayrhofer for the virtuosic percussionist Vivi Vassileva. Together, the pair have collected and tuned an enormous battery of percussion from repurposed rubbish.
The stage presented a striking array of litter, including an enormous plastic bottle marimba, a wall of tuned glass bottles, discarded flower pots, cooking pans and a washing machine drum.
