Singing sensation Laura Mvula broke off from her 40 date tour schedule last night (2 May 2013) to perform cabaret style at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre's (EICC) new £30m expansion space before an invited audience of 700 events industry leaders. Her seven-month tour includes major venues in Paris, Tokyo and New York with summer festival appearances at Glastonbury and T in the Park.
Classically trained in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire, Mvula is one of the music industries hottest new talents compared by some critics to the late great Nina Simone. Her cross over style includes: soul, jazz, classical, Caribbean, gospel and pop influences and her debut album, 'Sing to the Moon', released in March. charted in the top thirty UK albums.
Mvula's performance in the new Lennox Suite set up for tiered banqueting was the highlight of an evening designed to showcase the flexibility of the expanded EICC and followed an auditorium performance by master impressionist, John Culshaw.
The 2,000 square metre Lennox Suite features a hall-wide moving floor system for transformations from flat floored exhibition space to tiered theatre and arena setups in a fraction of the time required in conventional halls.