Delia Stevens is an award-winning percussionist who has achieved remarkable success in many fields.
Delia Stevens is a percussionist: a pioneer of future-facing ideas, visionary of sound and generous collaborator with “burning chops and a cosmic imagination”.
"percussion from Delia Stevens, whose thoughtful, insistent playing is crucial”
The Guardian
"first-rate musicians..exhilarating..there deserves to be a special mention for percussionist Delia Stevens"
FRoots Magazine
2023 sees Delia as Co-Guest Director with Sinfonia Cymru and violinist Simmy Singh, reimagining Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as a double concerto with improvised percussion, presenting her own BBC Radio 3 Series: Music and Machines, touring China with the Aurora Percussion Duo, playing a local water dam in Hebden Bridge as a percussion instrument with wild swimmers and a new duo with triple BBC Folk Musician of the Year harmonica virtuoso Will Pound.
Alongside these projects she will also be making a piece called Bodies of Water, using her local water reservoir as a percussion instrument played by local wild swimmers for Hebden Bridge Arts Festival, to draw attention to water pollution in the UK.
In 2022 Delia was made Artist-in-Residence at Leeds University, curating three chamber music concerts inspired by scientific research at the Bragg Institute (AlgoRhythms: Music and AI, Sounds of Metal, Multiscale Modeling), commissioning three composers (Oscar Escudero, Will Pound, Damien Harron) to write for percussion. She also gave a TedX Talk with her world-folk collective Kabantu called "Thinking in Freehand" at the Sage Gateshead, co-directed VOLCANO (percussion chamber music concert) for Multistory Orchestra at The Southbank Centre and was awarded an Associate Membership of the Royal Northern College of Music.
Other performance highlights include touring Avner Dorman's prolific 360° percussion concerto Frozen in Time for Prague's Last Night of the Proms (Beethoven Academy Orchestra) and across Germany (Lausitzer Philharmonie). She was also invited to perform alongside the BBC Singers for their 2021 Prom (Royal Albert Hall) in their "house band". Delia has played hang drum with the Portico Quartet (Barbican Centre), marimba for The Lion King UK tour and vibraphone for the Great British Bake Off soundtrack.
She is the co-founder of the Aurora Percussion Duo and world-folk collective Kabantu. Both groups have won the £10,000 Royal Over-Seas League Competition and tour prolifically; from the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Southbank Centre), Beijing's Forbidden Concert Hall, the BBC Proms Royal at the Royal Albert Hall and Luxembourg Philharmonie to Orkney, Cambridge, Shetland, Warwick and Shrewsbury Folk Festivals.
Whilst studying at the RNCM Delia also won the Gold Medal Competition (the highest award for soloists) and the Concerto Competition and as a teenager was a Category Finalist in the televised BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition.
She has worked with the National Youth Orchestra and National Children's Orchestras of Great Britain as a tutor and also held roles as Senior Lecturer in Percussion and Reflective Practice at Leeds Conservatoire.
