University News Last updated 16 January
Welcome to the first RBC This Week of 2026. After a much-needed break for all our students and staff, it was great to be able to welcome our students back to RBC last week for another busy term of studying, performing and all the other things that make these years so memorable for our young people. I can still remember a lot of detail about my own student days, and they are not that recent at all!
Last week we also welcomed a large group of doctoral students to RBC for the conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and Royal Musical Association, at which we heard more than 100 papers presented on an extraordinary variety of specialist subjects.
And there is a tantalising variety too in our programme for January to April: If you have not yet received your 24-page Highlights brochure, please do let us know using this email address.
You will see that we have a record number of public performances based on the Final Major Projects of our fourth-year Music students, covering everything from Henry VIII’s wives to video game music, and music for organ and drum kit to the music of Björk, and from Hong Kong Cantopop to the Band of the West Midlands Fire Service. Each of these projects represents up to a year of hard work by the student who has been leading it, and they need to sell tickets to cover the costs of where their particular passion has taken them – so do come and support them if you possibly can. Take a look at the performances on our events page.
And continuing the theme of art and politics that has run through the year, we also have some superb productions lined up from our third-year actors, including a new show inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, Nina Raine’s Consent, and Little Women The Musical. We are also taking our Spring Opera once again to Gas Street Basin, where we are unleashing Offenbach’s hilarious satire Orpheus in the Underworld. And our brilliant RBC Symphony Orchestra will be joined in February by rising star conductor Tess Jackson for a programme that combines Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5 with film scores that connect with the 1930s and 1940s world in which he composed it.
I look forward to welcoming you to RBC in the coming weeks, and in the meantime all of us at RBC wish you a happy and healthy 2026.
Stephen Maddock.