BBC PROMS
8 - 9 AUGUST 2025
11pm - 7am, Royal Albert Hall
12 Ensemble perform at dawn as part of this historic BBC Proms all-night concert. A rare opportunity to experience the Royal Albert Hall after-hours, with works by four trailblazing British composers alongside Messiaen's transcendental symphonic meditation.
Edmund Finnis \ Hymn (after Byrd)
Isabella Gellis \ Many Fruited Dog Tooth
Oliver Leith \ Honey Siren - II. (Full like drips)
Oliver Coates \ One Without
Olivier Messiaen \ L'Ascension - IV. Prière du Christ montant vers son Père
"It’s unusual for the precise hour of a performance to shape the creative direction of my programming. But there’s something remarkable about doing anything at this time of night (or is it day?) - let alone performing in the Royal Albert Hall. That weird, in-between bit before dawn. No-longer the dead of night, not yet light. Liminal, but in the good way. There’s a particular kind of energy - suspended, mysterious, magical - and I wanted to lean into that with the musical choices for our set.
All of these pieces explore a sense of this ‘unknown’ in their own way. There’s a stillness, a prayer-like softness-in-the-dark to Edmund Finnis’ Hymn (after Byrd) and Oliver Coates’ One Without. Both treat the ensemble as a unified organism, conjuring a halo of sound and texture that feels un-tethered from anything earthly or real - celestial whispers left to float up into the cavernous dome of the hall. Isabella Gellis’ Many Fruited Dog Tooth sensitively coaxes sounds from the orchestra that feel at once alien and yet strangely familiar, whilst Oliver Leith’s Ivor Novello Award-winning Honey Siren takes the sound of a siren and makes it gently weep, finding something deeply touching within the day-to-day. And approaching sunrise, I’m searching for transcendence through Messiaen; yearning harmonies dripping with intensity and luscious vibrato, gloriously striving up into the unknown above.
With four BBC Proms premieres and collaborations with artists Seckou Keita and Sleeping At Last, I hope it’s the best of 12 Ensemble; a programme defying pre-conceived concepts of style, space and time, and one that lifts you out into the unknown."
- Max Ruisi
Isabella Gellis
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Many Fruited Dog Tooth is a new 12 Ensemble commission from Isabella Gellis. Isabella is a British-Canadian composer of acoustic music. With tactility, play, and manipulation of perception at its core, her work often focuses on imagined and disguised sounds, steeped in the silly, absurd, and surreal.
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​“Many Fruited Dog Tooth {Cynodontium polycarpon] is the name of a moss native to Britain. I love all that this name implies: sharp and soft, blooming but also decaying, sounds that cling, embedded rootlessness. I imagine this music as an encounter with something that has already existed for a long time and will continue to do so once you stop listening.” - Isabella Gellis
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12 Ensemble premiered the work at Wigmore Hall in July 2025. The commission was kindly supported by the Vaughan Williams Foundation.
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Edmund Finnis
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“A rising star, the British composer [Edmund Finnis] seems to make the very air shimmer with his music.”
The Times
​Finnis writes; ​​
"Hymn (after Byrd) is the penultimate movement of my String Quartet No. 1 ‘Aloysius’, arranged here for string orchestra. It is a reflection on William Byrd’s setting of the fifth century hymn ‘Christe, qui lux es et dies’. That ancient melody is a prayer for Light within the darkness of the night. The falling and rising contours within it became integral to my work on the quartet as a whole, as did the mental image of the setting and rising of the sun."
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12 Ensemble gave the premiere of Hymn (after Byrd) in 2023 and the work features on their 2024 album Metamorphosis. ​"Numinous and luminously ethereal, this Hymn sounds at once ancient and contemporary" - Gramophone
Oliver Coates
Oliver Coates is a cellist, a composer for film and an electronic music producer. His music explores improvisation, dark ambient music, and intimate melodic cello with distortion and tape modulation. His most recent solo record is Throb, shiver, arrow of time (2024) released on RVNG.
One Without is originally from his critically acclaimed soundtrack to Charlotte Wells film Aftersun.​ "Reflecting the “the vivid glow of memory”— One Without is built around a repeating figure, overlapping with shimmering reverb trails and little else, it’s spare but flickers with warmth and light. Echoing and repeating for a little over four minutes, it feels like a meditation on constancy and loss, highlighting what stays the same and what subtly changes as memories flit through your head, again and again." – Pitchfork
Oliver Leith
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Oliver Leith is a London based composer making acoustic music, electronic music and video. His works have appeared at the BBC Proms, Tanglewood Music Centre, Wigmore Hall, Aix Festival, Transit Festival, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Heidelberg Festival and Riga’s White Night Festival. Accolades include an Ivor Novello award, a 2016 British Composer Award, and the 2014 RPS Composer Prize.​ In 2022 his debut chamber opera Last Days premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre with a sold-out run of performances. His second chamber opera The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor after Benjamin Britten premiered this Summer at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence to critical acclaim.
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12 Ensemble commissioned Honey Siren in 2019 and gave the premiere at the Barbican's Sound Unbound festival that year. The work features on their 2020 album Death and the Maiden and received an Ivor Novello award.
Leith writes; "I was thinking about sirens; the wailing kind, not the bird women singing on rocks. They make these beautiful, huge oblong sweeping glissandi between high and low, like a machine crying. They usually signal something ominous; these sirens do not. They are honeyed, dripping in globules of sweetness, golden and moving between solid and fluid. Like a smiling alarm.”
Olivier Messiaen
The "Prayer of Christ ascending to the Father" is the final movement of Messiaen's L'Ascension - a set of four symphonic meditations composed in 1933. The movement, scored for strings only, evokes a transcendent, mystical ascent of shimmering harmonic colour.
Known for his individual, distinctive musical language, Messiaen throughout his career took inspiration from India (deci tala), ancient Greece, and the orient and perhaps most importantly, the adaptation of birdsong, to create his own 'modes of limited transposition' within his music. The search for the mystical within his catholic faith was also centre to his compositions;
"My faith is the grand drama of my life. I'm a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none".
- Olivier Messiaen​​​​