The Augmented Orchestra (AO) is a technology created, developed and implemented by the composer Anna Clyne and sound designer Jody Elff. The idea is to expand upon an acoustic orchestra: to integrate contemporary audio technologies to the traditional orchestral model. Not a playback-with-orchestra model, and not looping or amplification, but rather a true merging of current sound manipulation tools with the long established sound world of the symphony orchestra.

They say: “Examples of AO processes are pitching shifting double basses down an octave to create an organ-like quality, running clarinets through distortion to emulate the sound of electric guitars, and adding harmonic clouds to flutes so that they hover above the orchestra long after they stop playing.” So why not just use an organ and electric guitars? It is because the quality of the sound is different – it is a completely new sonority, which is what drew Anna and Jody to this sonic exploration from the very start.

The Augmented Orchestra was first used in the world premiere of Anna’s Wild Geese, with conductor Cristian Mӑcelaru, at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2023. The Augmented Orchestra has since featured in Anna’s The Gorgeous Nothings, premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2024 with the Swingles Singers and BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, with Nicholas Collon conducting. AO also features in Anna’s PALETTE, to be premiered by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra in February 2025.

Operomanija is a production house based in Lithuania, dedicated to the creation and promotion of new music theatre through diverse cross-disciplinary artistic collaborations. Since its formation in 2008, it has produced about 60 contemporary operas and various multidisciplinary art projects. The organisation runs the Contemporary Opera Festival NOA (New Opera Action) – one of the leading international new music theatre events in the Baltic region. It also holds creative residencies related to contemporary opera, organises productions and releases of sound recordings, along with national and international promotion of produced works.

SONORA music was founded over a decade ago by Stanisław Suchora and Mikołaj Bylka-Kanecki. Recently, the agency merged with Malke Music Management, becoming a leading player in the classical and early music markets in Poland and Central Europe. The agency currently represents 19 classical artists, including Linus Roth, Annelien Van Wauwe, Thomas Sanderling, Nils Mönkemeyer, Bartosz Koziak, Marc Korovitch, Ana de la Vega, Marcin Świątkiewicz, and composer Elżbieta Sikora. It collaborates with ensembles such as Arte dei Suonatori, the Polish Radio Choir, and the Equilibrium String Quartet.

SONORA has organised tours for ensembles such as Cameristi della Scala, the Slovenian RTV Orchestra, the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, the Collegium Musicale Chamber Choir, the NFM Leopoldinum, the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra, the Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra, and the Robert-Schumann-Philharmonie Chemnitz. The agency was also responsible for the international tour of the Laureates of the 16th Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poznań, and collaborated with the Slovenian art collective Laibach on special projects. SONORA is also involved in organizing festivals, such as the All’improvviso International Festival of Early Music in Gliwice.

In the coming seasons, SONORA has projects planned with partners such as the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the Montenegrin Symphony Orchestra, the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Szczecin Philharmonic, Bozar Brussels, Seoul Arts Center, National Forum of Music, Eufonie Festival, Misteria Paschalia Festival in Kraków, Brandenburgische Sommerkonzerte, Pražské jaro, Stockholm Early Music Festival, and Reykjavik Early Music Festival. SONORA was created to initiate dialogue and foster engagement between different communities, cultures, and generations. It enables the realization of ambitious projects with the highest artistic standards, while also fostering and promoting innovative musical phenomena.

No Limits, jointly presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, promotes inclusion in the arts through its annual series (presented in tandem with the HK Arts Festival) featuring outstanding artists with diverse abilities from around the world. Showcasing differently abled artists from Hong Kong and Mainland China as well as the US and UK, the 2025 series features 11 empowering works spanning a broad range of classical and contemporary art forms, including a site-specific community dance program where professional dancers and a group of visually impaired community members explore fashion, personal identity and the relationship between caregivers and care recipients.

OPERA APERTA is the laboratory of contemporary opera in Kyiv, founded by Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. The showcase performance of the Opera House was the archeological opera Chornobyldorf, created and presented in 2020. Opera Aperta is continuously searching and testing new styles of contemporary music, compositional and instrumental theater, media opera, performative and interdisciplinary practices and has already won international recognition.

The Black Orchestral Network (BON) is a national organisation that advocates for Black orchestra musicians in the USA. One of its goals is to increase the number of Black musicians who are offered tenured positions in American orchestras. Recently, groups including the Cincinnati Symphony (Ohio) and the Charlotte Symphony (North Carolina) have acted on the BON’s recommendations as they created labor agreements with provisions aimed at increasing diversity. The organisation, founded in 2022, also works to publish data about diversity in orchestras, and helps to foster connections among Black musicians.

Scottish Opera’s Breath Cycle has been around since 2013. It began life as a collaboration between the opera company and Glasgow’s Gartnavel General Hospital Cystic Fibrosis Service to explore whether classical singing techniques might help the wellbeing of cystic fibrosis sufferers. Since 2021, however, it has been broadened to engage with sufferers from a range of conditions affecting lung health, especially Long Covid. Bringing together composer Gareth Williams (a former Scottish Opera composer in residence) and writer Martin O’Connor, the project both offered vocal guidance to participants – in terms of singing, vocal exercises and breathing techniques – and also drew on their experiences in songwriting workshops. These workshop sessions were made in collaboration with consultants from the NHS. Following several iterations of the workshops, the newly composed songs were drawn together in a ‘Covid Composers Songbook’. In January and February 2025, the project transformed into a live public event with performances of a selection of these songs by Williams, O’Connor and other Scottish performers.

Tai Kwun, Hong Kong’s decommissioned Central Police Station compound, reopened in spring 2018 as a non-governmental venue (cited by UNESCO in 2019) dually devoted to heritage conservation and cutting-edge artistic creation. The Prison Yard Festival (est. 2023), created in Tai Kwun’s spirit of repurposing historic spaces, reinvents the iconic courtyard where felons were once granted exercise privileges into a forward-thinking concert space focused on erasing cultural barriers, with each season hosting an international resident ensemble setting a theme for additional interactions with Hong Kong’s young professional musicians. (West-East Divan Ensemble, 2023; Australian Chamber Orchestra, 2024)

Clásica No Convencional (CNC) is a series of classical music concerts that take place in unconventional spaces, such as an abandoned warehouse in an industrial area that is being converted into a residential area or an underground parking lot. These are areas where there is no artistic programming and are more than four kilometers away from the nearest cultural center. They are not simplified concerts, for example, of movements of works, but of complete works, and they combine some hits from the repertoire with challenging languages of the 20th century. The staging is immersive and is designed for people who are not yet classical music audiences, with immersive lighting, projections and aromatic coloured vapors, and there is also a cocktail bar, finger food, bookstores, record stores and record labels, as well as works by contemporary Chilean visual artists on display. In just one year, they have exceeded 6,000 attendees in six concerts, half of them free and the other half paid, and they also always do an educational function for schoolchildren. The team behind the project is multidisciplinary and one of its leaders is the most charismatic Chilean conductor, Paolo Bortolameolli (1982), who has conducted more than 60 orchestras around the world and will take over the leadership of the Teatro Municipal de Santiago, Chile’s main opera house, in 2026.

Festival Divertimento is a private initiative, with no government funding, that regularly organises and presents chamber music concerts to the public, free of charge and in different venues in the city. The artists are all professional and contribute with their experience and enthusiasm to this project, which unlike many other initiatives, has managed to exist since 2015; 2025 is, in fact, its tenth year. Its programming is agreed upon with the musicians and includes not only European and American chamber music (written for a wide variety of instruments) but Latin American and particularly Mexican contemporary chamber music.