Today sees the opening of I found the giant and he was dead, Gabriel Kidd’s new exhibition at HOME, Manchester.
For this first institutional solo exhibition since completing their MFA as the Milein Cosman Scholar at the Slade School of Fine Art, Gabriel has created an immersive work of figurative and sound pieces inspired by local folklore, landscape, erosion, and medieval notions of time.
The Trust is excited to announce the premiere of the second of the two new works written by Fergus Hall as part of his YCAT Composer Fellowship, which the Trust supports in memory of Hans Keller.
Adrift for solo cello, was written for the exciting Australian cellist James Morley, and will be performed by him at the Wigmore Hall on 3 March 2026.
Tickets can be booked here.
The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025-27 Milein Cosman Scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art is Beth Simcock.
Like Milein Cosman, Beth spent her undergraduate years in Oxford, followed by further study at the Berlin Drawing Room, a residency in Japan, and an interdisciplinary residency working alongside musicians at the HQI Foundation in London.
Read more about Beth here.
The Cosman Keller Trust is very pleased to be supporting the vital work of the Amber Trust, providing musical education to blind and partially-sighted children.
Having suffered from impaired vision since childhood, Milein Cosman had a lifelong fear of losing her sight. In later life, the degeneration of her eyesight caused her increasing difficulty, but she continued to work as an artist, adapting her practice to find creative solutions to the problems of her altered vision.
For the past 30 years, the Amber Trust has helped countless children with vision impairment (and often other complex needs) develop their musical talents and fulfil their creative potential. Amber also supports the development of new teaching materials, as well as research which demonstrates the power of music to transform young lives.
2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of J.M.W. Turner.
The Trust is pleased to be supporting the educational work of the Turner’s House Trust, based at Sandycombe Lodge, the retreat that Turner built for himself and his father in Twickenham in 1813.
Working with 10 local primary schools, the Turner’s House educational programme introduces children to art and history through visits to Turner’s House and taking part in interactive museum workshops. As well as encountering Turner’s own art, children explore their local history, learn how to care for, catalogue and write about objects for display, and develop the skills to mount their own exhibition for family, friends and the local community.
The Cosman Keller Trust is excited to share the news that Tate Archive’s two-year cataloguing and digitisation project is now approaching completion.
We are grateful to all the wonderful staff at Tate who have worked so hard on this project, which ensures that Milein Cosman’s extensive archive of over 10,000 items will be preserved and made accessible to all.
To mark this significant achievement, the Project Cataloguer, Evangeline Mills, will be giving a talk, with a curated display of items from the Archive, in the Tate’s Show and Share series on Friday 14 November at 1 pm.
Tickets are free and can be booked here.
The Trust is delighted that the Astatine Trio will be joining the Elmore Quartet as Hans Keller Chamber Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama this year.
The Astatine Trio also took part in ChamberStudio’s very first Hans Keller Forum at Cambridge, and this year they returned there as Fellows, sharing their experience with the current ensembles taking part in the Forum.
The Astatine Trio will be performing Haydn and Ravel at the Guildhall’s Milton Court Concert Hall on Wednesday 6 October at 6 pm. Tickets are free and further details are here.
The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted that the YCAT Composer Fellow for 2025-26 is Fergus Hall.
The first of the two works Fergus is writing as part of his fellowship will be a string quartet for the current Hans Keller Artists, the Fibonacci Quartet, who will perform it at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday 30 September 2025.
Tickets available here
On Friday 15 August, the Finborough Theatre will present a new audio poetry recital exploring the work of Sidney Keyes, one of Britain’s finest poets of the Second World War, who was killed in action in 1943, shortly before his 21st birthday.
Remember Your Lovers tells Keyes’ story through the women he loved — above all, his unrequited passion for Milein Cosman, whom he met in Oxford, where he was a scholar at Queen’s College and she a student at the combined Ruskin-Slade School of Fine Art. (More about Milein’s time in Oxford can be found here.)
Performed by Claire Bloom, Catherine Harvey, Alexander Knox, Neil NcPherson, Annabel Mullion, Louse Mai Newberry, Will de Renzy-Martin and Whoopie Van Raam, Remember Your Lovers will be available free online from 15 August.
Further information here.
The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted to be supporting Leighton House‘s special commitment to the art of drawing.
Today sees the opening of a new exhibition, Victorian Treasures, featuring works from the collections of Cecil French and Scott Thomas Buckle, two collectors who began acquiring Victorian art against the grain of fashionable taste. This exhibition will give visitors a fascinating insight into the process of art collecting in a show that includes many works on public view for the first time.
Drawings by leading artists of the period collected by Scott Thomas Buckle will be shown in Leighton House’s new dedicated exhibition space for drawing, the Tavalozza Gallery.
On Tuesday 6 May, Susan Owens will give the 2025 Milein Cosman Lecture on the art of drawing, at the Slade School of Fine Art (where Milein Cosman studied in the 1940s).
Dr Owens’s lecture Places of the Mind, Portraits of the Soul will look at the role of drawing in soul-searching and taking stock — examining in particular the way in which the artists Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) and John Constable (1776-1837) both used drawing to pursue projects of intense introspection.
Tickets are free and can be booked here.
On Friday 9 May, the fourth year of the Castalian String Quartet’s residency at Oxford University will culminate in two celebration concerts in which students perform with the quartet in exciting and varied programmes of chamber music.
The evening concert, in which the Quartet will join with St Anne’s Camerata, includes premieres of new works for string ensemble by composers Leandro Landolina and Nick Samuel, both in their second year studying music at Oxford (pictured left). Full details and tickets here.
Earlier in the day, oboist Tom Kirby will join the Castalians in Mozart’s oboe quartet, and cellist Oliver Simpson in Schubert’s last chamber work, his cello quintet D.956. Full details and tickets here.
On Wednesday 23 April, the Hans Keller Forum will showcase the talents of the four ensembles who have been working together during its 2024-25 season, in its closing concert at the West Road Concert Hall. Details and tickets here.
The Seion Quartet, the Trio Thalassa, the Heartwood Quartet and the Sonas Quartet have spent three intense residencies in Cambridge, mentored by Donald Grant, Alasdair Beatson and John Myerscough. Also joining the Forum this year have been guest lecturer David Waterman and Artist-in-Residence Gabriel Kidd, the current Milein Cosman Scholar at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
A new podcast called Words on Wordlessness goes live today. Host Nicky Swett, who has spent years studying Hans Keller’s wordless method of analysing music, presents a fascinating exploration of the idea of communicating about music through music alone.
Each series presents one of Keller’s analytical scores in performance, after which Nicky discusses it with musicians, scholars and scientists.
The first series presents Keller’s analysis of Haydn’s Quartet in D minor Op.76 No.2, performed by the Castalian String Quartet, and discussed by violinist Sini Simonen, musicologist Kate Guthrie and composer and broadcaster Bruce Adolphe.
Listen here.
(Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts)
It is with deep sadness that the Trust announces the death of its founding chairman, Julian Hogg.
Julian was devoted to Hans and Milein and did more than anyone to perpetuate their legacies.
Their long and close friendship began sixty years ago, at the 1964 Dartington Summer School of Music.
The Cosman Keller Trust is delighted to announce that the Fibonacci Quartet are the new YCAT Hans Keller Artists.
Formed at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (where Hans Keller taught in the 1980s), the Fibonacci Quartet are already one of Europe’s leading young string quartets, and have had a string of major competition wins as well as their YCAT success.
The Trust will be supporting the Fibonacci Quartet for the next three years.
Next Tuesday, 1 October, the Atenea Quartet will give the premiere of Rock, Salt, Air, Water by Electra Perivolaris, holder of the first YCAT Composer Fellowship supported by the Trust.
The work is inspired by the coastlines of her home on the Scottish Isle of Arran and of the Aegean island of Chios, home of the Greek side of her family. In particular, it is the ‘tafoni’ — holes and circles that develop in the rock as it is weathered by salt, air and seawater — that have influenced her writing, as she maps in sound these multiple overlapping loops.
The concert is at 1 pm at the Wigmore Hall — full details and tickets here.
Today sees the opening of Heartlands, Gabriel Kidd’s new exhibition with Olivia England at the Flexitron Gallery in Penton Street, London N1.
Gabriel is now in their second year as the Milein Cosman Scholar at the Slade School of Fine Art and this exhibition gives an excellent opportunity to see their latest work, including a number of new drawings.
The exhibition runs until 25 November: full details here. Please note that Flexitron is open by appointment: to book, email info(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)flexitrongallery.com
On Friday 26 July, Alessandro Fisher and Roger Vignoles will give a special performance of Benjamin Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo at the British Museum, as part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition Michelangelo: the last decades, which is supported by the Trust. The evening will combine their performance with discussion of Michelangelo’s poems and art by Grant Lewis, the Milein Cosman Project Curator at the British Museum.
Further information and tickets are available here.
Hans Keller and Milein Cosman were closely associated with Benjamin Britten from the 1940s until Britten’s death, producing a huge volume of writings and drawings relating to his works. This sketch of Britten by Milein Cosman is one of many drawings of him held in the collection of her work at the Royal College of Music Museum.
On Saturday 6 July, the Musicians of All Saints will be giving another performance of Hans Keller’s Functional Analysis of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3, conducted by Sophia Bartlett.
They last performed this analysis in October 2021, and this time will be presenting it alongside the premiere of a new work for cor angles and strings by Robert Hinchcliffe.
7:30 pm, All Saints Centre, Friar’s Walk, Lewes BN7 2LE
Full programme details and tickets available here.
