Mourn

Following its sold-out premiere, FIGURE and Alkanna Graeca return with MOURN: a staged journey through grief, where ancient Balkan mourning traditions and song are reimagined alongside the music of Renaissance Italy.

MOURN unfolds through a series of poetic scenes, moving between concert, theatre and ritual, asking how we come to terms with death, and how we say farewell to those we love most.

At the heart of the performance is the funeral lament. In Renaissance Italy, composers looked to Ancient Greek tragedy to create a new style poised between speech and song. Lament became one of early opera’s defining forms, its influence spreading across Europe, reaching Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas 1000 miles away in England. Across the Adriatic, however, the mourning traditions which had been preserved in Greek tragedy had never disappeared. Throughout the Balkans, lament remained part of everyday life: sung not for the stage, but outward to a community of the living, the dead and the divine. MOURN places these parallel traditions side by side - the imagined antiquity of Western European music and the living inheritance of the Balkans. Traditional polyphonies from Albania, Epirus, and Thrace meet works by Claudio Monteverdi, Barbara Strozzi, and Carlo Gesualdo, constructing a ritual of grief that reaches across geography and time.

Historically informed performance ensemble FIGURE has been praised in The Times for its “high-risk, high-reward” projects, and in The Guardian as musically “unequivocally impressive, its sound invigorating, its commitment absolute”. Alkanna Graeca is a vocal trio blending raw folk traditions from the Balkans, Mediterranean, and Black Sea with free improvisation, whose “spine-tingling harmonies and dissonances have reinvented ancient polyphony for a contemporary audience”.

The original concept was devised by Alexandra Achillea and Frederick Waxman and premiered at Stone Nest.