Rolf Hind

Rolf Hind is playing the Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall on Friday 23 October, starting at 7:30pm. It's a solo bill, so the whole evening is his.

If you've come across his name but aren't sure where to place him, Hind has a bit of a double life. For fifteen years he worked mainly as a pianist, collaborating with some of the biggest names in contemporary music — Messiaen, Berio, Ligeti, Kurtág, Tan Dun, John Adams, Thomas Adès and George Benjamin. He premiered hundreds of new works worldwide during that time, so he knows his way around a score.

Around 2000 he returned to composing, and that's where the other side of his work comes in. He's been particularly inspired by India, and he describes its languages, philosophy, landscapes and culture as informing much of what he writes. You can hear that in the titles and the scale of the things he takes on: there's the piano concerto Maya-Sesha, Lost in Thought — a four-hour 'mindfulness opera' — The Secret Names, and Sky In A Small Cage, his opera about the Sufi poet Rumi. It's a wide-ranging body of work that pulls from a lot of different traditions.

The venue is the Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall, a 250-seat room at the University of Leeds School of Music on Cavendish Road, LS2 9JT. It's accessible through the Clothworkers Bar and opened in 1976, its name acknowledging both the Clothworkers' Company and the centenary of the Yorkshire College of Science, which later became the University of Leeds. The concert is on Friday 23 October at 7:30pm.