LITTLE CHILLI + MUSIC AND MEDITATION FESTIVALS
LSO at St Luke’s

THIS year the London Symphony Orchestra at St Luke’s has teamed up with the Asian Music Circuit to host a couple of overlapping summer festivals this year.
The Little Chilli festival, which features music from India, China, Indonesia, Japan and Pakistan, and has been running since May and the Music and Meditation season has just begun.
And this week there are three concerts from the Music and Meditation season beginning on Saturday with a performance of music for the pipa, a four or five-string instrument that has hitherto not be used much for performance as it was lost to Chinese music for “1,000 years”.
The concert features Chung Yu (pictured right), who is perhaps the world’s most acclaimed exponent on the pipa, as well as the Chinese lute and a seven-stringed zither known as the guqin.
Here she will be using the four-string pipa alongside bamboo flute player Wang Ci-Heng.
The second half of Saturday’s concert sees a dhrupad vocal performance.
The style of singing is well known in China and it is the old surviving form of north Indian classical vocals, featuring the highly-respected Uday Bhawalar, with Manik Mund on the pakhawaj, a double-headed drum.
The series continues with similarly themed concerts, featuring some of the world’s best musicians.