Nitin Sawhney is an award-winning composer and performer, having performed with Sir Paul McCartney, Anoushka Shankar, Akram Khan, Pink Floyd and Jools Holland.
He has released over 20 albums and written around 70 film and TV scores, including Netflix’s Mowgli and the BBC’s award-winning Human Planet series.
On Thursday 5 December, Sawhney and his band will collaborate with the world-renowned Hallé orchestra as part of its flourishing ‘Hallé Presents …’ series for a very special one-off performance at The Bridgewater Hall. The concert will include music from his genre-defying albums Prophesy, Beyond Skin, Immigrants and his latest release, Identity which are all inspired by music from around the globe as he responds to multiculturalism, politics and spirituality.
Sawhney will also perform a piece he has written especially for the concert which documents his experience of having a heart attack on 1 March 2024, leading to the original concert date in May 2024 being rescheduled. Thankfully, following surgery and a period of rest, he has now fully recovered.
An exciting part of Sawhney’s new composition will be The Bridgewater Hall’s magnificent pipe organ which Sawhney intends to play after having visited the venue to view the auditorium and decided to include the organ in his piece.
Nitin Sawhney said of the piece he has composed,
“I’m very excited to be playing with the Hallé, one of my favourite orchestras, and I am going to be writing a piece specifically for them. With this work I’m really trying to capture the feelings and internal psychology of having a heart attack. I am musically focussing on what happened around me at the time in relation to how I was medically treated, but also the aftermath of it in relation to my mental and emotional state.”
