Previous Projects

Club Seasons

Directors Peter Wiegold and Martin Butler, defined the cross-genre/cross-culture work of the club in over 100 gigs since 2011, much welcome these fresh voices, their bold new work, and you can expect to hear and see collaborative, boundary-blurring performances.

Third Orchestra run regular seasons at their home in Club Inégales, welcoming guest ensembles, bands and solo artists, and following the regular pattern of sharing a programme and then in collaboration with them. Our most recent seasons have been:

The Healing Circle, Spring 2026

Third Orchestra performed at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, and at Bush House, for the British Forum of Ethnomusicology. The appearance at Bush House felt particularly resonant for us at this time, having been the original home of the BBC World Service, whose coat of arms bear the motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation.’
The season completed back in our home Club Inégales with collaborations- first with Pangea, a collective of young composers aiming to bring their different heritage sounds into their compositions, and with Jam al-Jazz, a young Arabic Jazz group supported by MARSM.


Time Tradition Transfusion , Autumn 2025

With a wonderful crossover band: Lucy Zhao pi’pa - Bakr Khleifi oud - Stevie Wishart hurdy gurdy - Matt Bourne piano - Kalia Lyraki voice/nay - Pete Wareham sax - Mark van de Wiel clarinet - Shri Sriram bass - Ant Romero percussion. Joined by two talented young players from Tomorrow's Warriors, Shanise Hall trumpet and Anton Brown cor anglais. There will be just about enough room for everybody!

The season incorporated a performance with Indian rock band TAPI at SOAS, along with special performances for EFG London Jazz Festival, and a celebratory end to the season, back at our home Club Inégales, featuring a duo concert of Peter Wiegold playing keyboards and Christophe Fellay playing along taped excerpts from our 100 previous concerts.


Re:New, Spring 2025

The RENEW series at Club Inégales followed a call to emerging artists to bring us radical new work, offering them showcases in our intimate, welcoming environment. Guests included: Herbie Hopkins, Simon Sanders & Tim Beckham, Namvula Rennie, Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis, Lydia Kenny, Jui-Ying Huan, Morad Kashef, Ben Harlan and Matt Brombley.


Celebrate, Autumn 2024

Following on from Third Orchestra’s performance for Classical:NEXT at Boulez Saal in Berlin, this season included a symposium chaired by Peter Wiegold and ACE Senior Relationship Manager Adam Jeanes, featuring our own Associate Artists: Colin Alexander, Beibei Wang and Shri Sriram, and joined bye Ed McKeon of 3rd Ear.

ISPA presentation- A Soft Wind Stirs

January 2024, New York

Featuring ‘A soft wind stirs’ by Rouhangeze and Peter Wiegold New York, January 2024.

With a gently pulsing groove based on Mauritian trance rhythms, and the 'magic tones’ of the Tagore poem sung by mesmeric Mauritian singer Rouhangeze, this is a journey across the Indian ocean through layers of improvisation, to the unknown, beyond the horizon.

Showing the world can connect, renew, and co-create a better future.

International Council for Traditional Music

June 2023, Palermo

Keynote presentation: 'Between two waves of the sea- The story of The Third Orchestra’

See Writings and articles for details.

“The arts educate us about beauty. The work of Peter Wiegold belongs to the realm of fine art.”

Giuseppina Colicci,
Professor of Ethnomusicology UCLA

Classical:NEXT

May 2023, Boulezsaal, Berlin

Opening at Classical:NEXT in Berlin, May 2024, collaborating with other showcase artists - the Zafraan Ensemble the , the improvising/moving Stegreif Orchestra, and Komische Oper. With Emilia Mårtensson, Hyelim Kim, Iain Ballamy, Jáno Kružliak, Sören Birke, Cathy Millican, Kirpal Panesar, Matthew Bourne, Shri Sriram, Ravi Srinivasan and Ali Hassan.

The Ripple Effect
Turner Sims, Southampton
March 2023

The Third Orchestra’s recent'The Ripple Effect'project at Southampton’s concert hall Turner Sims included work with three special local artists Anna Durance,cor anglais, Matt Brombley,electronics and Issa Loyaan Farrah-Kelly,spoken word. Great new people joined the orchestra,Iain Ballamy, sax,Dennis Rollins,trombone and Emilia Mårtensson,voice.

Looking at the video, Iain's warm response, following the gig, can be seen at the end.

Roland Denning and Steve Folorunsho did a great job filming, given they were chasing our improvisation around. Look out for the beautiful soaring end, where we are transported from Mayflower Park in Southampton to join Hyelim Kim in the New World.

“It was sublime and ineffable. This concert seriously changed my life. Music is vital to me, but this gave me a new way of feeling and receiving it. By listening, I couldn't understand how I should feel, I was shocked I didn't know if I wanted to laugh or cry. This is the best concert and experience I have ever had.”

Audience Survey, Turner Sims

“Dear Peter
Thank you for the most incredible, moving and thought-provoking week. I have so much to say and digest with love.”

Alice Zawadski- voice/violin

Amadeus Centre, London

December 2022

The orchestra was joined by three distinguished guests from the Urmili Quintet, Georgia, to record and film.

Director Nugzar Kavtaradze, (panduri, duduki, salamuri), Shalva Abramashvili (chuniri) and Vladimir Marmaladze (panduri bani, duduki, chiboni)

We recorded Third Orchestra pieces and made a version of Nugzar's Cekvauri, featuring his beautiful duduki solos and Acharuli, a traditional song from the Black Sea.

“Your music is exceptionally free, and very interesting. I am proud to work with you.”

Shalva Abramashvili

Between two waves of the sea

Grand Junction, Paddington, London
5 May 2022

To God’s ear all sounds 
of love ring like Tibetan 
bells in harmony

Little Gidding- T. S. Eliot

Not known, because not looked for  
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness 
Between two waves of the sea.

An unbroken hour of music, inspired by the writings of Ursula Rucker and T.S. Eliot

Between two waves of the sea.- Hear T.S. Eliot sung in Creole.

“Huge shout out to Peter Wiegold and his brilliant ThirdOrchestra for their stunning performance last night. Respecting many different world traditions, fantastic musicianship, co-creation of the highest order... and what a magnificent church is St Mary Magdalene Paddington - surely one of the finest ceilings in London.”

Duncan Fraser, composer

Barbican Centre, London
2019

The orchestra were in residence in The Pit at the Barbican Centre, London in 11th-17th February 2019, playing to sold-out concerts at the end of the week.

We are enormously grateful for the Barbican's generosity in hosting us, with special thanks to Managing Director Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Sean Gregory, Executive Director, Innovation & Engagement and Toni Racklin, Head of Theatre & Dance.

‘Thank you for a stunning performance this afternoon. There will be lots more to say for the future but for now BRILLIANT will do. Congratulations.’

David Jones, Serious

‘Still reeling from last night's Third Orchestra outing - divergent, congruent, utterly compelling music-making, grabbing the audience by the scruff of the neck. I won't forget it. Thank you, it was a privilege to be there’

Sarah Gabriel singer/actor

At the end of a short Swiss tour in 2011, the Notes Inégales band recorded for two days in a studio near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. They had for a while been collecting ‘postcards from Miles Davis’ under the title ‘...brew’, mixing up new brews from a wide variety of tribute postcards. 

This recording was a chance to draw the project together and spend time paying homage to Miles, who paid no heed to musical boundaries, and had an awe-inspiring ability to create music directly with whoever was in the studio or concert right there. This alchemical flame could burn from just three notes on paper or three notes on the trumpet. His musicians were driven and lifted beyond even their own natural gifts. 

Peter Wiegold (Artistic Director Club Inégales), says "I had long wanted to make this homage, to become more absorbed, to try to imaginatively enter his world. As we set out for the second recording day, with Torbjörn Hultmark performing exquisitely on trumpet on the tour, I determined that this would be the day that we focused on Miles, the spirit, the method - and aware we were in Montreux, the place, the mountains." 

On the day the band made use of three ‘one-page’ scores, but actually almost all of this CD is improvised, evolving out of grooves and textures guided in real time by Peter's conducting signals. 

"Shortly after beginning a strong theme emerged, a kind of story," says Peter, "we are in the mountains and we can feel Miles’ presence in the air (the place where he gave some of his final concerts), but he is about to go and the mountains are angry at losing him; there are storms, winds, distant mountain bells, anger and tristesse and honour to a soul torn away." 

Miles in Torbjörn’s hands appears in many guises - triumphant, coaxing, melancholy, angry, some sounds like his throaty voice - then finally lost, whimpering, sometimes seeming to be squeezing out his last notes on earth. At one point in the session pianist Martin Butler and Peter found themselves on an C pedal with F minor chords over it. Months later, they remembered this harmony has long been in musical history a symbol of ‘farewell’. (In Bach and Mahler for example). Hence Envoi.