Young refugees from an award-winning poetry programme perform their own spoken word over orchestral backing tracks written in collaboration with composer Toby Young. Alongside these performances, Charlotte Tetley sings settings of poems including My Hazara People by Sadie Harrison with words by prize-winning refugee poet Shukria Rezaei, with a special performance by Play for Progress, a London-based charity that delivers therapeutic and educational music programmes for unaccompanied child refugees.

The concert programme will also include Barber’s stirring Adagio for Strings and Shostakovich’s arresting Chamber Symphony for Strings in C minor, which the composer dedicated to ‘the memory of victims of fascism and war’.

Orchestra of St John’s was founded fifty years ago by its Director, John Lubbock, and its original home was St John’s Smith Square in Westminster, where it still performs. OSJ appears regularly in London and at concert halls and festivals throughout the country and its concerts have featured world-famous soloists such as Dame Felicity Lott, Sir James Galway, John Lill, Yuri Bashmet, Tasmin Little and Steven Isserlis.