News and Press

Photos and text by Ruby Collins, Sub-Principal Bassoon

This spring and summer the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Community and Education team, RPO Resound, have been working with the Irene Taylor Trust to deliver The Lullaby Project, which empowers those with experience of the criminal justice system and asylum seekers to work with professional musicians and create personalised lullabies for the children and young people in their lives - creating something they can each treasure.

In May, we worked in partnership with Clean Break to facilitate workshops in which eight parents devised new lullabies, culminating in performances at London's Rich Mix and Cadogan Hall. In June, we worked with eight fathers in HMP Norwich to write songs to reach out to their children, the impact of which was featured on ITV News.

See more from these projects below.

This season, we’ve explored and celebrated composers who found themselves at odds with their societies, composers who faced exile and adversity and transformed the experience into pure life force, and other great creative spirits faced prejudice simply because of who they were. Our Music Director Vasily Petrenko conducted a series of concerts at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Albert Hall that included Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, Florence Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. We were privileged to welcome guest artists such as Yunchan Lim, Bruce Liu, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, and Maxim Vengerov.