The Stoller Hall

Smorgaschord Collective is a group of ambitious musicians aiming to cut away from ‘normal’ formalities of musical experiences, who come together to collaborate and create, with a strong emphasis on the new and the unusual. This concert will feature group members Eliza Millett and Sebastian Black.

ABOUT OUR RUSH HOUR CONCERTS

Avoid the early evening rush hour and relax with an hour of live music from up-and-coming performers here at the The Stoller Hall. 

Tickets are just £5, and you can pre-order a drink to collect and enjoy during the event. 

These hour-long concerts are a chance to catch artists from our Emerging Artists Scheme, which has been generously supported by the Jeremy Howarth Foundation 

Rush Hour Concerts offer – Book all five concerts for the price of four! Simply add tickets for all five concerts to your basket in the same transaction and your discount will be automatically applied at checkout.

Eliza Millett, cellist

British cellist Eliza Millett has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in a number of UK and international venues and festivals such as Wigmore Hall, Musikverein, Philharmonie de Paris, Yellow Barn, Banff Centre, IMS Prussia Cove, Mendelssohn on Mull, Aix-en-Provence and Peasmarsh Festival. She is a Countess of Munster Trust debut scheme winner, Hattori Foundation Award recipient and an artist for the City Music and Urakawa Foundations. Eliza has appeared multiple times on BBC Radio 3, CBC Radio (Canada) and NPR (Virginia, US).  She performed as a soloist with the Orchestra of St John’s for BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions (2016), is the winner of the Cello Sonata Prize at the Royal Academy of Music (2018), and gave her solo debut at the Lake District International Summer Festival (2019) collaborating with pianist Melvyn Tan. Eliza is a graduate of the University of Oxford (2017) and of the Royal Academy of Music (2019) where she studied with Christoph Richter.

As an active chamber musician, Eliza is the cellist of the award-winning Kleio String Quartet, Trio Cordiera (piano) and a founding member of Trio Kurtág (strings). She is a Britten-Pears Young Artist 2023 with both her string quartet and piano trio and is part of the Strijkkwartet Amsterdam Biënnale Residencies, 2023-4. Recently, the Kleio Quartet received First Prize and the commission Prize at the Carl Nielsen International Chamber Music Competition (Denmark). Eliza performs regularly with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, London Mozart Players, Sinfonia of London and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and has worked closely with composers György Kurtág, Thomas Adès and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Upcoming highlights of the 2023-24 season include tours of Scotland and the Netherlands with Kleio Quartet, a collaboration with cellist Eckart Runge (ex-Artemis Quartet) and a two year-long residency in Paris as part of ProQuartet.

Alongside her performance engagements, Eliza is committed to artistic programming. She is the co-director of Smorgaschord, an arts festival based in Oxford with new music at its heart, whose mission is to explore unexpected connections between musical and literary cultures, both local and global. It is composed of a small and flexible group of artists who come together each year to explore, define and communicate a new artistic vision. Highlights of Smorgaschord 2023 festival include a ‘Ligeti Day’, featuring artists such as Danny Driver and a collaboration between Kleio Quartet and György Kurtág Jr.

Sebastian Black, composer/pianist

Sebastian Black is an NZ / British musician, born in 1996 in Colchester, UK. He studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the University of Oxford, before studying with Sir George Benjamin at King’s College London. He is the current mentor composer at Péter Eötvös Foundation in Budapest, studying with Péter Eötvös and other composers including Unsuk Chin, Hans Abrahamsen, Stefano Gervasoni and Magnus Lindberg.

Recent works have included What Does The Harp Suggest? (premiered at the Budapest Music Center, 2023), Cantastoria for solo cello (for Smorgaschord 2022), Scherzo in La Maggiore (for orchestra, premiered in by Orchestra Wellington in New Zealand), We Dance, We Dance (for Meitar Ensemble in Tel Aviv, Israel), and The Mosaique of the Aire (for Het Concertgebouw’s Mahler Festival 2020).

Forthcoming projects include music for Ensemble ARS NOVA, for the Chor- und Orchesterakademie des WDR Sinfonieorchesters Köln, for Danubia Orchestra Obuda, and a new large orchestral piece for Péter Eötvös Foundation.

He runs Smorgaschord, currently based in Oxford and which consists of a Festival and a Collective. Founded straight after the pandemic, Smorgaschord Festival has seen Mark Padmore singing Harrison Birtwistle, a recital from drupadhamar, a focus on the artist Eva Frankfurther, and various informal pop-up concerts. The 2023 festival sees Danny Driver performing Ligeti, a new piece by Laurence Osborn for Ben Goldscheider, György Kurtág Jr performing the UK premiere of Zwiegespräch (written with his father, György Kurtág), music by Joshua Uzoigwe, and UK premieres from Martin Suckling and Thomas Adès. Smorgaschord Collective, in which he also performs as a pianist, is Associate Emerging Artist at Stoller Hall in Manchester.

His writing about music has appeared in publications in the UK and abroad. A new article on Hans Abrahamsen was published in TEMPO in 2023. His work is represented on SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music.