Image: London Oratorio. Photo Daniel Devlin, courtesy Southbank Centre, London
Jacob Collier will close ‘London Oratorio’, Es Devlin’s large-scale choral work for the Southbank Centre, at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 19 September 2026. The Southbank Centre’s listing gives two performances that evening, at 6.30pm and 8.30pm, each running about an hour.
The work was created in collaboration with composer and performer Kieran Brunt and is rooted in Devlin’s experience of being a Londoner. The Southbank Centre describes it as a love letter to a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, bringing those languages and musical cultures together in a piece about belonging and collective identity, with choral compositions developed with Devlin’s long-term collaborators Polyphonia and a number of artistic co-authors.
The announced line-up gathers voices from dozens of the city’s choirs, among them The Choir with No Name, the Idrîsî Ensemble, the London Community Gospel Choir, The London Lucumi Choir, Norrsång Choir and Third Culture Collective, representing traditions the venue lists as ranging from Balkan and Gospel to African, Bulgarian, Arabic, Hebrew and Nordic. Collier ends the event by leading the choirs and the audience in a collective finale.
The Southbank Centre presents the project as a continuation of its own history of massed, participatory singing. Devlin, an artist and designer known for concert staging and for kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre, has previously shown large-scale choral installations at venues including the Serpentine and Tate Modern. Collier has seven Grammy wins from 16 nominations and is, by the venue’s account, the first British artist to win for each of his first five studio albums. Age guidance for the event is 7+.
