Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with Seong-Jin Cho
First comes Borodin’s atmospheric musical picture of a caravan of merchants and their camels crossing the steppe, with gorgeous moments in the spotlight for some of the Philharmonia’s woodwind principals.
Then it’s time for Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, one of the peaks of the piano repertoire. From its majestic opening chords to the fiery fingerwork of its finale, with many a sweep-you-off-your-feet melody along the way, it gives Seong-Jin Cho the chance to show every aspect of his virtuosity.
The critic at its Boston premiere who declared that it was ‘hardly destined to become a classic’ could not have been more wrong.
Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony has been called ‘a film score without a film.’ Setting the scene outside the Winter Palace on a freezing day in January 1905, he goes on to describe in music of great power and immediacy the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of peaceful protesters by the Tsar’s Cossack troops.
Revolutionary songs and laments are threaded through the Symphony. And the violence of the finale, with its tolling bells and relentless drums, sounds a warning to the future.
BORAM KIM: GWANTONG 18
AN EXHILARATING DANCE SOLO. A BODY PUSHED TO ITS LIMIT.
Gwantong – to pierce, penetrate, or pass through
18 – the work’s eighteen-part choreographic structure
Raw, exhilarating and deeply personal, Gwantong 18 is a rare chance to encounter one of Korea’s most distinctive dance artists.
Acclaimed Korean choreographer and performer Boram Kim, founder of Ambiguous Dance Company, comes to The Coronet with his darkly funny and physically demanding solo work, Gwantong 18, for its one and only international performance.
Rather than a narrative, Gwantong 18 invites audiences to experience dance as they might experience weather or nature: moment by moment, through rhythm, breath, movement and presence.
Structured in eighteen sections, the work moves through exhaustion, humour, repetition, memory and defiance, as Kim travels across a shifting landscape of objects from his life. What emerges is the expression of a simple but profound question: what does it mean to dedicate a life to performance?
Premiered in Seoul in 2018, he revisits the 70 minute solo that asks him to give everything. Requiring extraordinary stamina, emotional resilience, precision and vulnerability, Gwantong 18 is a piece Kim wants to perform again before his body says no.
Since their sold-out UK debut at The Coronet Theatre in 2022 with Body Concert, Ambiguous Dance Company has built a remarkable relationship with London audiences and critics, returning in 2023 with Rhythm of Human and in 2024 with the immersive, site-specific The Belt.
Hyeyoon Park - BRUCH AND BEETHOVEN
Taking centre stage is internationally acclaimed violinist Hyeyoon Park, praised for her ‘exhilarating musicianship’ (The Times) and ‘huge palette of tone’ (The Guardian).
The programme opens with Anna Clyne’s Restless Oceans, driven by bold rhythms and percussive power, before moving into A Walk to Beethoven. As described by the composer, the work serves as an introduction to the symphony, inviting the listener on a musical stroll with glimpses of what is to come.
In this performance, the ensemble’s own voices will be woven into the piece through a specially created audio collage. Sharing their thoughts about the year ahead, it’s a portrait of a group brought together from across the world to create something new in London’s musical landscape and a celebration of the start of the new Fellowship year.
Counterattack : Youth
Four high school friends reunite over drinks. What begins as light conversation soon turns to love, marriage, work, and the unspoken pressure of where they feel they should be in life.
Counterattack: Youth is a one-hour pub drama set entirely in a real pub, with the audience seated as fellow patrons at the next table. No stage. No distance. Just four women in their late twenties, a round of drinks, and every conversation they've been putting off.
It is a little bit of everything: a celebration, an argument, a prank, a toast, and even a reminiscence about school days. But most importantly, it is one very honest conversation about what it actually means to be young right now.
Bloomsbury Festival - User Manual for a Broken Machine
A darkly comic performance exploring failure, burnout and the body under pressure reflecting Korean industrialisation, capitalism and diaspora.
Music composed and performed by Seayool.
A broken Daewoo vacuum cleaner. A user manual that no longer works. A body trying to follow instructions that were never written for her. User Manual asks what happens when a person can no longer follow the instructions they have been given.
User Manual for a Broken Machine is a darkly comic interdisciplinary performance using the language of instruction manuals, troubleshooting guides and malfunction reports as a performance score. Through text, movement, sound and fragments of Korean traditional music, the piece follows a performer who reads, repeats, mistranslates, repairs and gradually becomes the broken machine she is trying to fix.
Developed by KASSNA, the work explores failure, productivity, migration and the pressure placed on female bodies to keep functioning within broken systems. Moving between the domestic object and wider histories of Korean industrialisation, capitalism and diaspora, it asks what happens when a person, a machine, or a society can no longer obey its original design.
Absurd, physical and unsettlingly funny, User Manual for a Broken Machine turns repair into ritual, breakdown into performance, and failure into a possible beginning.
Ryan Zhu - LUNCHTIME CONCERT SERIES
Ryan began playing at the age of four and has since performed internationally in recital and with orchestra. In 2026, he won First Prize at the Hastings International Piano Competition, also receiving the Orchestra Prize and Audience Prize. He was a semifinalist at the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition, where he received the G. Henle Verlag Prize, and later advanced to the semifinals of the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition.
In 2023, Zhu won Juilliard School’s Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, earning a full scholarship and performing in a gala broadcast on WQXR. He has appeared with orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, performing across Europe and North America. A Juilliard graduate, he is currently studying at the Yale School of Music with Melvin Chen.
Image: Matthew Andrews
CHEN YI STUDIO: CURRENT/Y
A DANCER COMES FACE-TO-FACE WITH HER LIVE DIGITAL TWIN
From acclaimed Taiwanese artist Chen Yi, Current/y is a spectacular immersive work combining live performance, motion capture, game-engine technology, lasers, large-scale projection and spatial sound.
Equipped with motion capture sensors, a dancer controls her avatar in a real-time duet, interacting with a constantly shifting virtual world projected across a vast screen.
Moving through the work as if scrolling through a social media feed, the performer enters a space governed by data and algorithms, where clicks, followers and attention become measures of human value – a kind of currency.
Part of Chen Yi’s ongoing Current/y series, the work continues to explore the idea of value in an age of rapid technological change – from social media and the attention economy to misinformation and surveillance.