The festival, on October 31 and November 1, will take place across the Barbican Centre and surrounding venues including LSO St Luke’s, St Giles Cripplegate, The Pit, Milton Court Concert Hall and the Barbican Lakeside, highwalks and Conservatory.
Huw Humphreys, the Barbican’s head of music, said they hope to attract people who have never been to a classical concert to “take a risk” on classical music.
Electronic artist and pianist Masaki is putting on an experimental live performance of Nicole Lizée’s Hitchcock Études featuring clips from Psycho and The Birds.
Masaki, 52, who lives in Canada but used to be based in London, said the capital is the perfect venue for the festival because it is “where things are happening”.
She said: “London is the spot where without judgement artists can be free. Artists can moved forward, sideways, any direction...What the Sound Unbound festival embodies is that spirit, that energy, the facilities are also phenomenal. That atmosphere for us to connect with the audience.”
Other festival highlights include an overnight performance, Overnight Meditation, led by cellist Matthew Barley from 11pm to 6am, Benedetti playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, John Cage’s Child of Tree - a composed improvisation for cactus and pea pod shakers in the Barbican Conservatory - and “Quartet 360°” featuring Calder Quartet where the audience can listen to music by composers including Beethoven and Schubert in The Pit.
Mazdak Sanii, chief operating officer of Boiler Room, warned not to “type cast” younger audiences.
He said: “There’s definitely a danger in type-casting younger audiences as only being able to digest ephemeral three minute pop songs, whereas actually we know there’s a mass audience of young people with very sophisticated ears and who are really inquisitive about both new music and the roots of the music they care about.
“Ultimately I think the genre boundaries are no longer so distinct in any case: from conversations between traditional and electronic sounds in concerts by ensembles like the London Contemporary Orchestra, to artists like James Blake or Floating Points who are classically trained and incorporate harmonic complexity in their work that’s more usually associated with classical compositions, there’s a huge amount of cross-pollination.”
