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 has given over 250 World and UK premieres by composers from more than thirty-five countries. Riot enjoys close working relationships with some of the most important contemporary composers, including Liza Lim, Clara Iannotta, Chaya Czernowin, Ann Cleare, and Georg Friedrich Haas.
In 2020 the ensemble was awarded the debut 'Ensemble Prize' by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Riot has appeared at Wigmore Hall, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Dark Music Days (Iceland), Tampere Biennale (Finland), Nordic Music Days (Sweden), November Music (Netherlands) Warsaw Autumn (Poland), Darmstadt (Germany), Wien Modern (Austria), Arctic Arts (Norway), Tzlil Meudcan (Israel) and Distat Terra (Argentina).
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, 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 multi-year residencies at the Royal Academy of Music and Liverpool University 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.
They have appeared Leçons de ténèbres with Huddersfield Contemporary Records, 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.