International Concert Series 2026-27

Founded in 2021 by musicians Hannah Seymour and Sinéad Walsh, EMPOWER is a platform championing women's voices in music through performance, commissioning, advocacy and community. What began as a grassroots concert series has grown into a national platform supporting emerging musicians and women composers through high-profile performances, new commissions, industry conversations and collaborative projects across the UK and Ireland.

For Mountain Airs, EMPOWER brings together a programme that moves between musical and natural environments. Danish-British composer Emily Pedersen's Coastlines reflects her longstanding interest in relationships between music, place and the natural world, while Francesca Le Lohé's No More Girl Friday brings together music and moving image. The programme continues with Samantha Fernando's Kinesphere for solo flute, Judith Weir's Airs from Another Planet, Pernille Faye's Embers and Louise Farrenc's Sextet in C minor for Winds and Piano, creating a musical landscape that stretches from the intimate to the expansive, and from contemporary voices to the nineteenth-century repertoire.

This event is presented as part of the International Concert Series 2026-27 - The Sounding World - at Royal Holloway.

Event programme

Emily Pedersen: Coastlines
Francesca Le Lohé (b. 1990): No More Girl Friday, video edited by Sherie Sitauze
Samantha Fernando (b. 1984): Kinesphere for solo flute
Judith Weir (b. 1954): Airs from Another Planet
Pernille Faye (b. 2002): Embers
Louise Farrenc (1804–1875): Sextet in C minor for Winds and Piano

About the featured artists

Emily Pedersen is a Danish-British composer born and raised in Thailand and Malaysia, whose work explores relationships between music, place and the natural world, with particular interests in ecological storytelling, environmental sound and marine bioacoustics. Her music has been written for ensembles including ORA Singers, the Piatti Quartet and the Hallé Orchestra, and she made her Bridgewater Hall debut in 2024 as recipient of the RNCM's annual Symphony Orchestra commission.

Composer and community musician Francesca Le Lohé works across the UK and Japan, creating ambitious projects that bring together music, different disciplines and cultures. Her work includes community opera, new music for traditional Japanese instruments and immersive, site-specific performance. She was an LSO Soundhub Associate from 2022 to 2024 and is also Project Manager at Contemporary Music for All, which supports musicians of all abilities to participate actively in contemporary music.

The performers are Sinéad Walsh (flute), Hannah Seymour (oboe/cor anglais), Hannah Shimwell (clarinet), Alice Knight (French horn), Jamie King (bassoon) and Archie Bonham (piano).

Emily Pedersen