Edge of Sound, Queen Elizabeth Hall

With his side-project A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Jeremy Barnes, drummer of Neutral Milk Hotel, has spent the last 13 years exploring the folk music of Eastern Europe. Balkan, klezmer, gypsy music, Turkish folk songs: they all feed into the often instrumental and always intensely evocative songs of Barnes and his fiddling bandmate Heather Trost.

After an acclaimed tour performing their live re-writing of the soundtrack to Soviet director Sergio Paradjanov’s 1964 film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, A Hawk And A Hacksaw return to London for something that promises to be even more spectacular. They’ll be joined by a cast of classical musicians to perform music by two of Eastern Europe’s greatest composers: György Ligeti and Béla Bartók.

As well as a composer, Bartók was one of the founding fathers of ethnomusicology. He spent years travelling through different territories, encountering and documenting folk melodies from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and even as far afield as Turkey and the Middle East.

Edge of Sound aims to evoke the traditional music of Balkan village bands, a which Bartók recorded and interpreted in his own work. A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Hungarian cimbalom player Balász Ungar, performing alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra, will perform Bartók’s ‘Three Village Scenes’ and his celebrated Music for strings, percussion and celesta, and Ligeti’s Romanian concerto, as well as an original piece. It’s a combination of folk energy and orchestral that will be awesome to witness.