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​​In 2022 I co-directed In Sync with Ria Ashcroft, a collaboration between MishMash Productions and Scottish Ensemble for twelve string players with Design from Helen Fownes-Davies. In Sync won the 2023 Young Audiences Music Award for Best Large Ensemble, and has subsequently been performed at venues including the Southbank Centre and Kings Place. For a trailer, click here.

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We devised the entire show with the performers, looking for the theatrical possibilities already contained within the music and finding ways for an audience to see as well as hear the connections passing between twelve musicians. We were particularly captured by the comraderie of the ensemble itself and how they seemed to embrace each others' different personalities whilst working together. We thought this was a great model for our audience of teenagers and so encouraged the ensemble to share elements of their non-musical lives between the pieces of music. 

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The programme moves across centuries and musical worlds, including music by Purcell, Shostakovich, Jonny Greenwood, Caroline Shaw, Jessie Montgomery and Reena Esmail. The scale of the ensemble gave us the chance to create everything from tiny, intimate moments between individual players to sequences involving all twelve musicians moving together across the stage.

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