Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s summer programme explores the contrasts and crossings between rural and urban life.

Katherine Balch’s still life, a Sound Investment commission, creates a vivid, multi-movement ‘sonic ecosystem’. Blending ensemble, field recordings and video into an immersive portrait of her Connecticut homestead, we hear insects at dusk, spring deluges, ruminants and birdsong transformed into delicately hybrid soundscapes.

Where Balch listens outward to the land, George Lewis’s …and other spirits, a Sound Investment commission, searches inward, its mobile conductor and large ensemble channelling energies of instability and resistance. A companion to his earlier BCMG commission Breaking, the new work carries Lewis’s urgent reflections on struggle, agency and the fragile architectures of contemporary life.

Framing these premieres are Elliott Carter’s bright, propulsive ASKO Concerto and Charlotte Bray’s shimmering Reflections in Time, completing a programme alive with shifting landscapes, real and imagined.

Charlotte Bray (b. 1982): Reflections in Time (2018)

Elliott Carter (1908–2012): ASKO Concerto (2000)

George Lewis (b. 1952): …and other spirits (2025–26) Sound Investment World Premiere with Mobile Conductor

Katherine Balch (b. 1991): still life (2026) Sound Investment UK Premiere

Yshani Perinpanayagam, piano