News and Press

Concert launches three-day Kilburn Music Mile Festival 

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) will make history this November when it performs the first concert at the iconic Gaumont State Cinema in nearly five decades, as part of the three-day Kilburn Music Mile Festival.

The French composer Francis Poulenc was no stranger to London. Over the course of his life he made intimate connections with orchestras, audiences and critics in the city that warmly received his music throughout the mid-twentieth century and beyond. A composer of ballets, chamber music, piano works, operas and choral music, he had a natural tendency towards the fluid yet fragile quality of the human voice and its infinite capacity for devotion, as demonstrated in the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites and pieces such as La voix humaine and Gloria. A man known for his sense of humour that permeated his music, he was a devout Catholic, and his religious feelings can be felt most keenly in his choral repertoire.

Want to go beyond the concert programme in our 2025–26 Season? Accompanying our series with Music Director Vasily Petrenko at Southbank Centre and the Royal Albert Hall, our #MoreMusic playlists help you discover music with pieces that defined the lives and journeys of the composers we feature, as well as historical recordings and works by their contemporaries.