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A Form of Exile: On Edward Said and Late Style

The City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books come together for music and literature inspired by Edward Said, featuring Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge.

Part of Classical Season - Spring/Summer 2025
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A pianist sits at a grand piano looking down at the keyboard

This, the second concert collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books, presents dazzling works of music and literature created at the end of great careers.

Join us to discover the connections between them, as traced by heroic intellectual Edward Said in his own final book.

The Palestinian-American postcolonial theorist and political activist best known for his 1978 book Orientalism, who died in 2003, was a regular contributor to the LRB.

The last piece he contributed to the paper, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, became the first chapter of his final book, On Late Style, which was posthumously compiled and published in 2006.

The book ranges from Beethoven to Britten, Genet’s Prisoner of Love to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in positing a theory of late style as a separate, strange and vital aesthetic category.

Insofar as its power and influence have endured in a different way to the rest of Said’s work, it is also an embodiment of its own ideas.

The CLS and the LRB animate these daring interdisciplinary connections with a programme that takes in the greatest of all late works, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – ‘a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications’ (Alex Ross) – as well as Richard Strauss’ last orchestral piece, and Britten’s String Quartet No.3, which references Death in Venice, his final opera.

Readings from texts read by, written by (sometimes addressing the music directly), and written about Said, are interspersed throughout this performance directed by Ed Madden.

Together, these musical and literary works tell a story of courageous perseverance, startling originality and lateness as ‘a form of exile’, as Said wrote: a moving account of artistic, human and political truths, which has never been told quite like this before.

Performers

City of London Sinfonia

Tess Jackson conductor

Katherine Spencer clarinet

Ursula Leveaux bassoon

Amadea Dazeley-Gaist horn

Khalid Abdalla actor

Juliet Stevenson actress

Will Keen actor

Aliyah Odoffin actress

Repertoire

Beethoven: Grosse Fuge in B flat, Op.133 arr. Weingartner for string orchestra

Strauss: Duett-Concertino in F for clarinet, bassoon, harp & string orchestra

Interval

Purcell: March; Canzona from Funeral Music for Queen Mary

Britten: Recitative & Passacaglia (La Serenissima) from String Quartet No.3 in G, Op.94

Strauss: Horn Concerto No.2 in E flat

Need to know

Age guidance
For ages 7+

For your visit

This event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall Southbank Centre

The Queen Elizabeth Hall is open from 90 minutes before events start until they finish. It’s closed at all other times.

Queen Elizabeth Hall building at Southbank Centre View larger image

Plan your visit

The Queen Elizabeth Hall is home to both our second-largest auditorium and the Purcell Room.

Getting here

Our address is Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX.

The nearest tube stations to us are Waterloo and Embankment; Waterloo is also the nearest train station. And more than 20 different London bus routes pass within 500 metres of our venues.  More information on getting here by rail, road or river is available on our Getting here page.

We’re cash-free

Please note that we’re unable to accept cash payments across our venues.

Access

We’re working hard to remove barriers, so that our facilities and events can be accessible to as many people as possible.

All help points, toilets, performance and exhibition spaces at the Southbank Centre are accessible to all, as are the cafes, bars and restaurants. We also have excellent public transport links with step-free access.

All information about booking wheelchair spaces, step-free access, blue badge parking, access maps and guides and other help available whilst you’re here, including details about our Access Scheme, can be found on our Access page.

Food & drink

From coffee to cocktails, filling favourites to fine dining, plus some of London’s best street food – it’s all here at the Southbank Centre.

Places to eat and drink whilst you’re here

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