RNCM PRiSM | Upcoming Events in Summer 2025
13 May 2025
Upcoming Events and Performances
Simon Knighton Curates: Sound Sculptures | 11 June 2025
Composer Simon Knighton (PRiSM Doctoral Researcher) and the House of Bedlam will present “Sound Sculptures: A Concert Merging Installation and Live Performance” at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on 11 June 2025 at 8pm.
Supporting the release of Knighton’s debut album on Nonclassical, Sound Sculptures, Dynamical Systems, Natural Environments (2024), this concert will feature the second performance of Sound Sculpture No. 8 (premiered at the Southbank Centre in 2024), exploring new tuning systems and spatial harmony through chimes, micro-tuned xylophone bars, live instruments, and synthesizers.
The event will also feature music by Manchester-based composer-performer Gemma Bass, and by RNCM student composers Emmy Lambert, Sidney Patrick, and Gloria Xia.
Dangerous Matter: New Opera by Dr Zakiya Leeming | 24 June 2025
Dangerous Matter is a new opera by Dr Zakiya Leeming (RNCM PRiSM Artist and Producer in Residence), with a libretto by Sam Redway Wells and Leeming. It draws inspiration from the science of immunology and the writings and life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an 18th-century writer who advocated for the Turkish practice of inoculation in England.
The story centres on Lady Mary’s efforts to introduce inoculation to Britain, a moment of international knowledge exchange that challenged prevailing attitudes toward science, gender, and nationalist medical hierarchies. It is punctuated with moments of foreshadowing of a future where the lessons we once learned have been abandoned, as well as reflections from the writings of Montagu, and the workings of viral and immune cells as Smallpox proliferates, or is resisted.
Part of the Thanks for the Memories project (supported by the Wellcome Trust), the opera results from a collaboration between Dr Leeming and Professor Paul Klenerman, Professor of Immunology at Oxford University. The project explores the history and science of immune memory and Klenerman’s current research through musical composition and public events. In 2024, Leeming and Klenerman worked with five secondary schools across Oxford and Manchester to realise 46 world premieres by new young composers.
Dangerous Matter will be premiered at the RNCM Theatre, 7pm, Tuesday 24 June 2025.
Creative and Production Team:
Zakiya Leeming Composer
Sam Redway Wells Director, Dramaturg
Melvin Tay Conductor
Rosie Middleton Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Ruth Harley Sarah Chiswell
Ankur Dang Princess Caroline / Multi-role
Jasmine Higgs Dutchess of Marlborough / Multi-role
Yu Chinen Lady Mary Hervey / Multi-role
Oscar Bowen-Hill Dr Charles Maitland / Multi-role
Dr Zakiya Leeming (L) | Professor Paul Klenerman (R)
'A Possibility' at Manchester International Festival | 17-20 July 2025
Photo credit: Marcus Ginns
A Possibility is an artwork for the theatre by Dutch artist Germaine Kruip with new compositions by composer Emily Howard (Director RNCM PRiSM) and American composer Hahn Rowe, exploring the possibilities of perception, sound and performance.
Emily Howard’s new piece, Rhomb in Silhouette (scored for string quartet and percussion), responds to a brass sculpture Rhombus, 2017, developed by Germaine Kruip in collaboration with Thein Brass. The piece will be featured alongside, and in seamless dialogue with, Rowe’s compositions during the second act of A Possibility, which will be performed at the RNCM from 17 to 20 July, as part of the Manchester International Festival (MIF) 2025.
Further information of A Possibility and MIF 2025 can be found here.
