Winners of the Ernst von Siemens Ensemble Prize, Riot Ensemble is an internationally renowned group dedicated to the creation, exploration and presentation of great contemporary works and new music yet to be discovered. The members of Riot are some of the top European soloists in new music, and with Riot they work as performers, curators, commissioners, and collaborators, creating and producing a diverse array of projects.

Based in the UK, Riot is particularly active in bringing emerging international voices to the British new music scene and since 2012 has given over 350 World and UK premieres by composers from more than thirty-five countries. Their annual call for scores repeatedly receives more than 500 submissions, and over the past ten years has resulted in twenty-five commissions. Riot enjoys close working relationships with some of the most important composers of our time, including Liza Lim, Clara Iannotta, Chaya Czernowin, Ann Cleare, and Georg Friedrich Haas whose evening length piece Solstices was commissioned by Riot.

Riot performs regularly at celebrated venues and festivals in the UK such as Wigmore Hall and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival as well as abroad, including Klangspuren, Darmstadt, Dark Music Days, Tampere Biennale, Nordic Music Days, November Music, Warsaw Autumn, Arctic Arts and Distat Terra.

Riot has regularly sought to establish multi-year partnerships that allow for deep work making a lasting impact on both the ensemble and their collaborators. In 2020, the ensemble began a new partnership with Kings Place where they presented five concerts, a day-long festival, recorded a commercial LP as well as six contributions to their RPS-shortlisted “Zeitgeist Commissioning Series” during the COVID19 Pandemic, and recorded video concerts for the Wien Modern and Music Biennale Zagreb festivals. Riot has additionally founded residencies at Liverpool University and at the Royal Academy of Music where they run a multi-year mentorship programme, generously supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne. 

Riot boasts an extensive discography, and has recorded at venues ranging from the Royal Festival Hall to Air Lyndhurst Studios to Deutschlandfunk Köln. Their debut release on Huddersfield Contemporary Records, Speak Be Silent, was named one of the ten most important recordings of the year by Alex Ross in the New Yorker, and has been praised as ‘one of the best recordings of 2019’ by Sequenza 21 and ‘a most impressive release’ by Australia’s Limelight magazine. Fiona Maddocks was equally effusive about their recent album, Vestige, in The Guardian (‘…each of these contrasting tracks is played with expression and finesse by this first-rate group’).

Latest releases include their second appearance on HCR (a portrait of Patricia Alessandrini’s chamber music), an LP of Laurence Osborn’s Ctrl, and the live recording of Ben Oliver’s Love Letters for AI, funded by the University of Southampton and performed at Turner Sims (Southampton) and Kings Place (London) as part of an initial project on artificial intelligence that Riot continues alongside Ben.

The ensemble’s work has been generously supported by Opus 2 International and Arts Council England grants, the Garfield Weston Foundation, PRS Foundation, the Foyle Foundation, Diaphonique, the Ambache Charitable Trust, the Vaughan Williams Trust, the Marchus Trust, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and the Holst Foundation.