Hilgeum and Alice Zawadzki: Live at the Purcell Room

Musically and geographically, connecting Korean string trio Hilgeum with innovative anglo-Polish singer Alice Zawadzki is genius and their performance at London’s Southbank Centre was stunning.

The intimate setting of the Purcell Room was full to capacity with a truly diverse audience across gender, age and nationality. We all gathered to hear these women perform modern music, while not trying to put them into a specific genre box.

My interview with Alice for an episode of Harmonious World just a few weeks ago centred on the process whereby she collaborated with Hilgeum for a week in Korea, preparing to perform a selection of each other’s tunes. In this special performance in London, Hilgeum and Alice each performed a selection of their own songs, before they came together with Butterflies and a mash-up of Utopia with Za Górami, the title track from Alice’s 2024 album.

It was a delight to hear each selection of their own music, before they came together. Hilgeum consists of Yoin Cho (gayageum), Yerim Kim (geomungo), and Somin Park (haegeum). Together, the two zithers and the fiddle work to provide the strings and percussion with the musicians’ well-honed variety of techniques. For those of us who had never seen these beautiful, traditional  instruments, the evening was a delightful lesson in their modern use.

Similarly, Alice’s inventive voice and violin provided solo, other-worldly music, particularly in the evocative Get Thee to the Truth. An openness to cultures, music and collaboration exudes from every part of her being.

In July 2025, I previewed all that London’s K-Music Festival has on offer this autumn, and I’m aiming to get to more shows before it ends at the Barbican on 20 November. The people behind the K-Music Festival are Serious, who produce the EFG London Jazz Festival, this time working alongside the Korean Cultural Centre UK.

All told, this performance was brilliant, with lighting effects that enhanced the music and an immensely successful collaboration across cultures and genres.

The joy of being a journalist who crosses genre boundaries is that it doesn’t matter to me where you put this music. One thing is certainly true, that this evening took my understanding of Korean music way beyond my previous experience of manufactured K-Pop bands. I look forward to discovering more.