‘Grab a sandwich’, enjoy a ‘light lunch’ or a ‘quick bite to eat’. The language of lunch slips down easily, but does this mean that music, played live in the middle of the day, shouldn’t provide more to chew over?

For the past decade, Britten Sinfonia’s RPS Music Award winning ‘At Lunch’ series has been providing meaty musical fare for lunchtime concertgoers, with new music firmly at the heart of these chamber concerts – 43 commissions to date, from leading composers including Gerald Barry, James MacMillan, Peter Maxwell Davies, Brett Dean and Kaija Saariaho, and emerging talent (with nearly half the new works by composers under the age of 30).

In many ways, our ‘At Lunch’ series flies in the face of accepted convention (something which we, at Britten Sinfonia, seem drawn to). Traditionally, lunchtime and daytime programming has worshiped at the altar of the familiar – a mix of much loved music to offer a pleasant diversion from work, or an interlude in life’s busy pattern. And, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this – what’s not to like about Death and the Maiden, or a Beethoven quartet, or a selection of Mozart arias?

But, this perception of an audience that knows what it likes, and likes what it knows, undersells the intellectual curiosity that I find characterises so many concertgoers and allows us, as an orchestra, to stretch the parameters of our programming. And it’s worth remembering that many of the now much loved chamber works, in their time, provided audiences with the ‘shock of the new’. Just as earlier audiences engaged with the music of their time, by commissioning new music for our ‘At Lunch’ season, we allow audiences to see music through the prism of today’s composers - some of music’s most stimulating minds - who also co–curate the concerts, selecting works that inspire and beguile them. And this throws up interesting juxtapositions, so that Ligeti, Bach and Scarlatti rub shoulders with a new work by Anna Clyne (that will be premiered in January 2016) and a new commission by Bryce Dessner (of cult band, The National) shares company with Bartók Duos and Schumann’s Piano Quartet. (April 2016). Since 2013, audience members have had a hand in commissioning new music for the series, via our Musically Gifted scheme – perhaps the strongest endorsement of our belief that ‘new music’ won’t make audiences choke on a lunchtime menu.

Writing in The Guardian in 2009, Charlotte Higgins put her finger on the essence of the lunchtime experience: ‘there's something brilliant about hearing music at lunchtime, when you're still relatively fresh, and the day is only half done’ she wrote. ‘One can return to the desk invigorated; smug, even; certainly mentally ready for the rigours of post-prandial duties. It's about a zillion times more pleasurable than the sandwich-at-the-desk routine.’

If we offer a walk on the more adventurous side of lunchtime fare – and it’s one that over 25,000 people have been happy to follow over the past decade - then it is because we want to inject into our hour-long daytime concerts the same sense of joy and enquiry that we strive for in our longer evening programmes. By putting lunchtimes firmly back on the musical menu, and offering an interesting, invigorating – and sometimes downright spicy – musical mix, with generous helpings of new music, the hope is that, like new fine food, once tried, audiences will continue to come back for more.

Happy birthday ‘Britten Sinfonia at Lunch’ and here’s to the next 10 years…

Britten Sinfonia ‘At Lunch’ 10th anniversary season begins on November 27 in Norwich (Cambridge and Wigmore Hall, London on December 1 & 2 ). Visit www.brittensinfonia.com for information