In recent years, John Gilhooly has encouraged a new relationship between Wigmore Hall and the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF). Since its foundation in 2013, LCMF has doggedly pursued its mission to ‘provide a home for the promiscuous music lover’.

‘These eccentric hurdy-gurdy instruments first created in 1913 still sounded musically radical after all these years.’
– Roberta Smith, The New York Times

This concert, in association with Performa biennial, New York, and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, welcomes an extremely rare visit by Luigi Russolo’s infamous intonarumori (noise intoners). This will be the first time these instruments have been to the UK for over 110 years, since they set up camp at the London Coliseum on the eve of war in 1914. Russolo’s intonarumori mark the birth not only of noise music and sound art but of experimental music itself. 

Though most of the original instruments were lost or destroyed in the Second World War, composer Luciano Chessa faithfully reconstructed the intonarumori in 2009 for Performa, New York. Chessa's Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners will finally reach these shores on 17 January 2025 as the culmination of the London Contemporary Music Festival's 10th anniversary programme. 

Here – at the very same venue where Filippo Tommaso Marinetti first introduced futurism to Britain in a lecture in 1912 – Wigmore Hall and LCMF present a slate of UK and world premières for the intonarumori composed by Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Ellen Fullman, Chris Newman, Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad, Pablo Ortiz and Margareth Kammerer.

The concert also includes two revivals of works that were first performed in 1913 and 1916, respectively, by futurist poet Paolo Buzzi and the instrument’s inventor himself Luigi Russolo, and Jennifer Walshe will perform three mysterious Irish Dadaist poems.

In the second half, Ensemble Klang performs OCCAM DELTA XXIII, a world premiere commission from the 92-year-old composer who gave birth to drone music, Éliane Radigue, working in collaboration with composer/musician Carol Robinson.