Where Songs Travel: Poetry, Memory and Music Along the Silk Road.

A journey through music inspired by the ancient Silk Road, exploring how songs, stories and poetry travel across cultures and centuries. Audiences are invited to ponder how music from different places can unexpectedly speak to each other, and how a song written hundreds of years ago can still feel completely alive today.

From Baroque opera and Persian poetry to Urdu ghazals, Armenian lullabies, jazz and contemporary works, this recital brings together diverse musical traditions connected by a shared language of memory, longing and hope.

Lydia Shariff is a British mezzo-soprano praised for her commanding stage presence and luxurious tone. A graduate of the Opera School at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, she is a Britten Pears Young Artist and recipient of awards and bursaries from organisations including Help Musicians and the International Opera Awards Foundation. Her repertoire spans opera, oratorio, song and jazz, with a particular interest in Baroque repertoire and contemporary music. Recent engagements include performances with English Touring Opera, Longborough Festival Opera and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Francesca Lauri is a collaborative pianist specialising in the vocal repertoire of song and opera. She recently won the Help Musicians Accompanist’s prize at the 2025 Kathleen Ferrier Awards and previously the collaborative piano prizes at the 2024 Royal Over-Seas League Competition, John Kerr Awards, Ashburnham English Song Awards, the AESS Dorothy Richardson English Song Prize, Eastbourne Singing Competition and the Somerset Song Prize. She is the current Lord and Lady Lurgan collaborative piano fellow for the RCM vocal department.

With special thanks to The Cockayne Foundation for its generous sponsorship of the Silk Road Concert Series.