Date: Wed 16th July 2025 

Time: 7.30pm 

Venue: Cluny 2, 34 Lime Street, Ouseburn, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2PQ 

Tickets: £12 advance and £15 on the door 

Box Office:  https://shorturl.at/uTRSj / 0191 4404124 

Baadal Dvaar se Nazar (A Glimpse Through the Cloud Door), is an original experimental work by William Rees Hofmann featuring Benedict Taylor, where sarod meets viola. It explores both tradition and solitude through the dhrupad idiom on the sarod, and openness and experimentation through explorations of consonance, dissonance, harmony, timbre, and resonance on the viola. Inspired by the soundtracks of the films of Mani Kaul, the piece is a new work rooted in Indian classical tradition yet which moves beyond and experiments with form. 

Presented by Gemarts and Jazz North East and zerOclasikal

GemArts award winning Masala Festival is back from 14th – 20th July celebrating a mix and blend of the finest South Asian Arts and Culture, packed full of performances, exhibitions, events, workshops, talks, pop ups and delicious Indian food in venues, places and spaces across the North East. For full Masala Festival 2025 programme visit gemarts.org 

William Rees Hofmann is a multi-instrumentalist specialising in both the Indian Sarod and the Afghan Rubab. Classically trained in viola, Hofmann earned a BA in Hindustani Vocal Music from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujarat, and also holds an MMus degree from SOAS in Sarod and Rubab Performance. William has performed internationally both solo and with Jāmi Ensemble, including at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Patiala Punjab, Muzaffar Ali’s Jahān-e-Khusrau, Café OTO, Iklectik, Sage Gateshead, and the Edinburgh Fringe, among others, as well as run workshops on the classical music of Kabul. He has toured and performed extensively in the UK alongside artists such as Jonathan Mayer, Amina Khayyam, Sarathy Korwar, and Najma Akhtar, and released a cassette of solo viola compositions on Night Ritual Recordings in 2013, entitled A Burial Shroud. 

Benedict Taylor is a leading figure within contemporary composition, modern string performance and improvised music in the British and European new music world. The central focus of his work is on new composition for live performance, film, theatre, contemporary dance, art installation and electro-acoustic composition. In performance, he predominantly works within improvisation, new composition and 20th/21st century music. Described as a virtuoso violist, through his performance work there is a focus on solo performance as a creative and investigative process. An award-winning composer for film, theatre and television, he has composed for over 35 feature films, shorts and television/online series in both the commercial and independent sphere (Netflix, Amazon, Blumhouse, Film London, Ivanhoe) with his work showing at many leading international film festivals and theatre venues worldwide. 

Watch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=A7B_9d_r6UxWJC3-&v=-AS4TmmAPck&feature=youtu.be