Songs of Wars I Have Seen

In 2007 new-music ensemble the London Sinfonietta and period-instrument outfit the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment together gave the first performance of Heiner Goebbels’s Songs of Wars I Have Seen, commissioned by the Southbank Centre to mark the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall. Seventeen years later, the two orchestras are reunited under fast-rising conductor Chloe Rooke for a London revival of this landmark setting of wartime diary entries by Gertrude Stein, a work that manages to prove harrowing, poignant and consoling all at once, and whose visions of war have scarcely been more relevant.