RPS Music Awards 2023

Rebecca Franks meets the founders of Manchester Collective, winners of the Ensemble Award, to learn their recipe for success

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Ensemble Manchester Collective

In the spring of 2016, in a Shoreditch restaurant, violinist Rakhi Singh and cellist Adam Szabo dreamt up Manchester Collective. It was one of those astonishing right place, right time things,' says Szabo, now the ensemble's artistic director and chief executive. 'We thought it might be fun to put on some chamber music - and, in the way you do when your life responsibilities are not that big, within 90 minutes we agreed we'd do a year of concerts.

From the start, Manchester Collective had a distinctive ethos and style - surely no small part of why it has won this year's Royal Philharmomic Society Ensemble Award. The programme for its debut concert was typically eclectic: Biber interwoven with Cage and juxtaposed with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. The players spoke to the audience; the performance was in the round; there was stage-lighting (hastily bought from Ikea, reveals Szabo). The aim was to make the classical concert experience part of contemporary culture, rather than seem like a museum artefact.