The Jupiter Orchestra will give its second concert on Thursday 8 October 2026 in the Great Hall at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, performing Mozart, Brahms and Haydn in one of the City of London’s most historic interiors.
Founded earlier this year by conductor Christopher Clark, the orchestra made its debut in March at the WilkinsonEyre-designed Gasholders Building in King’s Cross, where musicians performed beneath the cast-iron frames of the former Victorian gasworks. Its next performance moves from an industrial landmark to the Grade I-listed North Wing at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, home to the Great Hall and the celebrated Hogarth Stair.
Designed by James Gibbs during his eighteenth-century rebuilding of the hospital, the North Wing dates from 1732, the same year Joseph Haydn was born. The concert concludes with Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D major, London, his final symphony and one of the defining works of his years in the capital.
For Clark, the relationship between repertoire and setting sits at the heart of the orchestra’s work.
“The Jupiter Orchestra began with a simple idea: exceptional music in extraordinary spaces,” said Clark. “At Gasholders, we explored what a reimagined industrial space could bring to the music. At Barts, Haydn and Brahms find a natural home in the Great Hall. Each concert explores how a room can shape the way we hear an orchestra.”
The programme opens with Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, followed by Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major, performed by 22-year-old Norwegian rising star Bjørg Pas. Currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music, Pas has appeared as a soloist with the Oslo Philharmonic, Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra and Zabrze Philharmonic. In 2025, she won First Prize at the Michał Spisak International Music Competition and also received the IGNM Special Prize at the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg.
Her appearance reflects a core aim of the orchestra: bringing exceptional emerging musicians into close artistic partnership with established professional players.
“The orchestra is built around the standard of the playing,” Clark explained. “The Jupiter Orchestra brings together exceptional artists, with a focus on listening at a high level. If the listening is serious, everything improves: balance, detail and intention.”
The concert has been developed with Barts Heritage, the independent charity responsible for the Grade I-listed North Wing and Henry VIII Gatehouse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Following a major programme of repair and conservation, Barts Heritage is developing the North Wing’s future as a place for public events, cultural performance, heritage and wellbeing activity.
The performance will bring live orchestral music to a room shaped by nearly three centuries of hospital history, surrounded by the names, portraits and physical traces of generations associated with St Bartholomew’s.
“Space affects sound. I want the audience and the orchestra to experience how the architecture shapes what they hear. When you’re surrounded by a unique structure, balance changes, projection changes,” Clark added. “At Barts, there is a natural conversation between Haydn’s musical language and the wood, gold and proportion of Gibbs’s architecture.”