Academy of St Martin in the Fields

The Radcliffe Trust supported the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ digital campaign during lockdown, aimed at creating work for its musicians and expanding the amount of audio visual footage of the orchestra that is available online. The Academy successfully raised £100,000 from a number of sources, enabling them to fund streamed broadcasts of three full-length concerts from their recent archive, and three days of recording sessions. New film recordings of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony and Grainger’s Danny Boy will form the backbone of an online festival celebrating the Academy’s work in early 2021.

In autumn 2020 they launched a new concert series at St Martin in the Fields, performing to a small socially-distanced audience and streaming performances, to reach a wider public. They will be using funds raised to make some of this content more widely available, and will soon be announcing exciting plans for a series of high-profile films with our Music Director Joshua Bell, to be recorded early in 2021.