12 Ensemble

‘It’s time to take cinema music in hand, to eliminate the bungling and the inartistic and to thoroughly clean the Augean stable. The only way to do this is to write special music’. – Shostakovich

Sheffield-based 12 Ensemble displayed its daring artistry and jaw-dropping versatility during a four-concert residency at Wigmore Hall in 2023-4. Its returns with a typically imaginative programme that includes Bernard Herrmann’s chilling music from François Truffaut’s dystopian film Fahrenheit 451, trains the spotlight on two Hollywood exiles from Nazi Europe, Franz Waxman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and ends with a masterwork by Dmitry Shostakovich, whose world was turned upside down by Stalinism and the Second World War.