Calendar of London Concerts 1893–1914

The site forms a supplement to Simon McVeigh’s Music in Edwardian London (Boydell Press, 2024), a study of a rich and exciting period in British musical history. It was a time of experiment in every branch of concert and theatre music, attracting new audiences to the thrilling sounds of a new century.

While opera and musical comedy have been thoroughly documented (as, for example, in J.P. Wearing’s monumental The London Stage), London concert life has been much less well served. There are online calendars and printed listings, but no single point of entry. This website has been designed to rectify this omission.

The aim is to provide access to programmes of the main orchestral, choral and chamber concert series from 1893 to 1914, through a single searchable spreadsheet.

The initial tranche of programmes relates to the symphony concerts of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra (1897–1914), the London Symphony Orchestra (1904–1914), the New Symphony Orchestra (1909–1914), the Philharmonic Society (1893–1914), and the Richter Concerts (1893–1904). Other series and concert data will be added in due course.

Click on the Calendar of London Concerts 1893–1914 to see the full dataset in Google Sheets, and follow the instructions on the first sheet. You can then search under various headings.

Acknowledgements

Much of the data was originally compiled as part of a project entitled The Transformation of London Concert Life, 1880-1914, at Goldsmiths, University of London (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). The researchers were Simon McVeigh, Leanne Langley and the late Cyril Ehrlich, working with Eva Mantzourani, who undertook the initial data collection. The present spreadsheet design owes much to the work and advice of Sarah K. Whitfield (Royal College of Music).