FIGURE and Alkanna Graeca return with MOURN: a staged journey through grief, where ancient Balkan mourning traditions and song are reimagined alongside the music of Renaissance Italy. 

MOURN unfolds through a series of poetic scenes, moving between concert, theatre and ritual, asking how we come to terms with death, and how we say farewell to those we love most. 

At the heart of the performance is the funeral lament. In Renaissance Italy, composers looked to Ancient Greek tragedy to create a new style poised between speech and song. Lament became one of early opera’s defining forms, its influence spreading across Europe, reaching Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas 1000 miles away in England. Across the Adriatic, however, the mourning traditions which had been preserved in Greek tragedy had never disappeared. Throughout the Balkans, lament remained part of everyday life: sung not for the stage, but outward to a community of the living, the dead and the divine. MOURN places these parallel traditions side by side - the imagined antiquity of Western European music and the living inheritance of the Balkans. Traditional polyphonies from Albania, Epirus, and Thrace meet works by Claudio Monteverdi, Barbara Strozzi, and Carlo Gesualdo, constructing a ritual of grief that reaches across geography and time.

Alkanna Graeca is a vocal trio blending raw folk traditions from the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Black Sea with free improvisation, whose “spine-tingling harmonies and dissonances have reinvented ancient polyphony for a contemporary audience”. 

The original concept was devised by Alexandra Achillea and Frederick Waxman.

Vocalists Alexandra Achillea, Irini Arabatzi, Dunja Botic‍

‍Violin Naomi Burrell, James Toll

Lute Sergio Bucheli

Double Bass Carina Cosgrave‍

Kanun Konstantinos Glynos

‍Chamber Organ Frederick Waxman

‍Stage Director Alexandra Achillea‍

‍Assistant Director (Movement and Dramaturgy) Konstantina-Maria Spyropoulou‍

‍Music Director & Creative Producer Frederick Waxman

Lighting Designer Edward Saunders

Cover Photo Credit: "Nyx (the night)," 2019. Photographer: Ioanna Sakellaraki

In the first of a series of baroque and contemporary music as Guest Artist as LSO St Luke's, we are joined by Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, winner the 2024 Young Artist Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, and described by The Guardian as ‘a singer of rich and fearless versatility’.

Centred around Bach’s cantata Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, BWV 199, the concert will feature three world premieres, commissioned by FIGURE, from Alex Paxton, Lara Agar, and Oliver Leith.

Lara Agar New Work (Commissioned by FIGURE)

Alex Paxton New Work (Commissioned by FIGURE)

Oliver Leith A different fantasie after Locke (Commissioned by FIGURE)

Johann Sebastian Bach Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut BWV 199