Cutting-edge composer and director Heiner Goebbels’ Surrogate Cities takes over the RFH in a major collaboration between the SBC and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

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Trinity Laban's young musicians collaborate with the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Foyle Future Firsts and players from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain to explore Goebbels' extraordinary work which - drawing upon an eclectic mix of musical influences, texts and sampled sounds - translates the mechanics and architecture of the city into music.

Co-founder of ‘So-Called Radical Left-Wing Wind Orchestra’ (1976–81) and the art-rock trio ‘Cassiber’ (1982-92, featuring British percussionist Chris Cutler), the 59-year-old German composer Goebbels has won numerous awards for his genre-defying musical and theatrical works.  Written in 1994 for large orchestra, voice, mezzo soprano and sampler, Surrogate Cities is an evening-long collection of works that confronts the complexities of urban life, through sample sounds and texts by Paul Auster, Heiner Mueller, and Hugo Hamilton.  Goebbels’ musical language encompasses a wide range of reference, from jazz riffs, rock licks, cabaret, sound bites of city life, singing of a Jewish cantor to dynamic build-ups using the entire orchestra – where sound and text overlap in layers of meaning.

The evening performance of Goebbels’ gargantuan work will be preceded by Surrogate Cities ‘Exploded!’ as Southbank Centre artists and students of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance collaborate with young people from east and southeast London to deconstruct Goebbels’ work throughout the foyer spaces of the Royal Festival Hall.  Responding to the work’s urbanisation and musical themes, new music, choreography, and other creative projects will be produced and presented by hundreds of young people from schools in Southwark, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham, and Tower Hamlets.  Southbank Centre Artist in Residence and Laban Centre graduate Lea Anderson will work with dance students on new choreography set to music from Surrogate Cities.  She will be joined by composer Fraser Trainer who will direct the musical component of Surrogate Cities ‘Exploded!’

Gillian Moore, Southbank Centre’s Head of Classical Music, said, ‘I am delighted that Southbank Centre is able to collaborate with Trinity Laban on this monumental work by one of the most original musical minds working today.  I am especially thrilled that so many young urban musicians in South and East London are taking part in a work that not only defines the meaning of the modern city but also radically rethinks the meaning of an orchestral work.’

Goebbels’ experimental theatre is part of Music Nation, a nationwide weekend of live events devised and led by the BBC celebrating the UK’s orchestral and music making communities.  Additional concerts and events in the weekend include Southbank Centre Resident Orchestra the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who takes over the Queen Elizabeth Hall for concerts and an open rehearsal.  Part of Shell Classic International, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer, return to Southbank Centre following their landmark 2011 concert celebrating Hungary’s EU Presidency.  Music Nation, produced with additional support from Arts Council England, is part of the countdown to the London 2012 Festival.