🔗 Booking Link Coming Soon: In partnership with Howard Assembly Room
📅 Sunday 21st June 2026
🕢 Time: 3pm onwards
📍 Howard Assembly Room, 32–34 New Briggate, Leeds LS1 6NU
2026 marks the 15th anniversary of our flagship Leeds Summer Solstice Festival, celebrating South Asian music and culture. To honour this landmark year, we invite you to our most expansive and immersive edition yet — a Double Bill Evening of Celestial Song.
Each year, as the sun reaches its highest point and the longest day stretches into a luminous evening, we gather in Leeds to welcome the Summer Solstice through music, listening, reflection, and shared experience. Rooted in astronomy, natural cycles, and the resonant Sounds of the Earth, the festival brings the depth of South Asian classical traditions into dialogue with the celestial — reminding us that music, like nature, moves in cycles of light, time, and transformation.
With over 300 years of South Asian presence woven into the cultural history of Leeds, this gathering stands as both continuity and renewal — a collective moment beneath the longest sky of the year, where ancient knowledge meets the present.
Festival Focus 2026: Voice & Vocals
This year, the festival turns its attention to voice — the human instrument closest to breath, intuition, and the body's rhythm. Through conversation and performance, we explore how Indian classical music holds time itself: how Raags shift with the hours of day, seasons, mood, and atmosphere, carrying the emotional and spiritual texture of light in sound.
The Howard Assembly Room, with its warm acoustics and intimate setting, becomes our home for a day of deep listening, stillness, and communal resonance.
3:00–4:00pm Afternoon Salon: Raag, Taal & Time: Modal Music and the Cycles of the Day
This conversational salon explores how Hindustani classical music aligns with the rhythms of time — from the freshness of morning Raags and the contemplative weight of twilight, to the expansive, glowing qualities suited to a solstice evening.
Rather than treating time as clockwork, this session invites audiences into a musical understanding of time as feeling, season, breath, and atmosphere. It opens a doorway into how musicians listen to the world — and prepares the ear for the evening's unfolding musical journey.
Evening Double Bill - An Evening of Celestial Song
As the solstice evening settles, two concerts invite the audience into a radiant world of voice, poetry, and musical imagination — forming a continuous arc of sound across tradition and expression.
5:30–7:30pm Mukul Kulkarni & Company
An accomplished exponent of Khayal from the Gwalior tradition, Mukul Kulkarni is known for his refined, thoughtful approach to performance. His artistry lies in allowing each Raag to bloom through carefully chosen bandish, weaving melodic architecture, rhythmic cycle, and poetic meaning into a seamless whole.
His voice carries clarity, restraint, and emotional depth — offering a meditative yet expressive journey through the classical landscape, illuminated by tradition and shaped with grace.
8:00–10:00pm Koyel Bhattacharya & Company
Often described as a “songbird”, Koyel Bhattacharya brings a deeply emotive and lyrical dimension to the evening. Her singing moves with effortless fluidity and soaring tonal beauty, marked by sensitivity to the emotional world of each composition.
She is joined by master percussionist Kuntal Das, whose elegant and dynamic tabla playing provides pulse, structure, and shimmering texture. Together, they create an intimate, immersive soundscape — an offering of voice, rhythm, and poetic devotion.
From the grounded clarity of Gwalior Khayal to the airy, expressive flight of Koyel's singing, this Double Bill becomes an arc of celestial sound, echoing the movement of the solstice itself.
🎶 Come listen deeply. Come linger. Join us beneath the longest light of the year — and welcome the solstice through sound.
