Press Materials

The following materials are authorised for press purposes. For press enquiries, please contact Jackie Newbould at jackienewbould1[at]gmail.com.

Riot Ensemble Bio

Riot Ensemble connects people to great contemporary music in concerts and events that are just as innovative, vibrant and rewarding as the music itself. 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 London with a national and international reach, Riot is particularly active in bringing emerging international voices to the British new-music scene and since 2012 has given over 250 World and UK premieres by composers from more than thirty-five countries. In 2023, their annual call for scores received more than 500 submissions, and in the past six years has resulted in more than twenty 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.

In 2020 the ensemble was awarded the debut “Ensemble Prize” by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Riot performs regularly at Wigmore Hall and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) as well as Dark Music Days (Iceland), Tampere Biennale (Finland), Nordic Music Days (Sweden), and November Music (Netherlands) with recent appearances at Warsaw Autumn (Poland), Darmstadt (Germany), Wien Modern (Austria), Arctic Arts (Norway), Tzlil Meudcan (Israel) and Distat Terra (Argentina).

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 have presented five concerts, a day-long festival, recorded a commercial LP (release: early ’24), recorded 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 three-year residencies at the Royal Academy of Music (from 2021) and Liverpool University (from 2023) through which they work with a range of composers, performers and faculty across disciplines to develop bespoke projects that benefit the students and communities of these institutions.

Riot has 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 most recent release, Vestige, in The Guardian (‘…each of these contrasting tracks is played with expression and finesse by this first-rate group’).

Upcoming 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 this year alongside Ben.

In their first decade, Riot’s work has been generously supported by Opus 2 International and Arts Council England lottery grants, the Garfield Weston Foundation, numerous private sponsors, PRSF, Diaphonique, the Ambache Charitable Trust, the RVW Trust, the Marchus Trust, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and the Holst Foundation.