Archive for category: news

Pleased to see such a positive review (here) of Thursday's concert with the Berkeley Ensemble –  thank you to the Leicester Mercury!

A mad few days of concerts but great fun! Tuesday saw Mozart (Quintet for Piano and Winds), Poulenc (Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano), and Woolrich (Favola in Musica, based on music of Monteverdi), with the Berkeley Ensemble, at St Peter's Streatham, where their residency is. Many thanks to Molly Nielsen for stepping in at extremely short notice when our regular bassoonist was unexpectedly held up in Israel…. Then Wednesday was Schubert, Mahler (Rückert Lieder) and Finzi (Earth and Air and Rain – an incredible intuitive understanding of Hardy's poetry by Finzi) with Marcus Farnsworth in Brighton, as part of Brighton College's Autograph Concerts series. This seems to be a fantastic setup with a great range of instruments and programmes, all within the school itself, in the lovely Great Hall. It was particularly heartening to see a considerable number of school pupils in the audience! Then Thursday lunchtime was another performance of the piano and winds programme with the Berkeleys, this time in Leicester, as part of the extremely successful Leicester International Music Festival lunchtime concert series. A beautiful venue (the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery) with a fabulous piano and consistently sold-out audiences, this series seems to be onto a winner! It was a privilege to be part of such a prestigious line-up of performers this season, and we were bowled over by the audience's warm welcome. A hectic few days, but wonderful music in lovely venues with great colleagues.

Owing to a double-booking, Steffan Rees is no longer able to take part in February's Music at St Peter's concert. We are extremely grateful to Matthew Lowe for stepping in at short notice! The programme for this concert will still include music by Schumann and Beethoven in the cello half and by Handel, Mendelssohn and Quilter in the sung half. 

One of the great bonuses of this job is travelling to and performing in beautiful places; one of the great disadvantages is never having time to stay put and explore! Thus our visit to Penrith lasted not much more than twelve hours, and dreams of a lesirurely few days of fell-walking and pub lunches were dashed by commitments on either side…. However Marcus and I enjoyed performing for the Penrith Music Club, whose regular venue, the Methodist Church, was pleasingly warm on a cold January night! This was our first outing of Mahler's wonderful Rückert Lieder, which we paired with Schubert in the first half (a combination we're repeating in Brighton next week); switching to English in the second half, we revisited Turnage's Three Songs and then Britten's Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, which we're still discovering new things in two years after we first performed it.  A quick burst of rehearsal; a well-received performance; a short night with wonderful hosts (who apparently have a marvellous view which we never saw as it was dark when we arrived and dark when we left…); and then back on the road in time to coach at the Academy all afternoon and take a chorus rehearsal on the Peter Maxwell Davies opera in the evening. It was an unexpected surprise to have the composer himself turn up to the rehearsal! But a privilege to work through some of the music with him and to see him hear the music live (rather than in his head) for the very first time!

The first concert in the Chancery Bar Association's new series seems to have gone down a treat! Nicola Corbishley's programme 'Tu fedel? Tu costante?' was a great success in the Edinburgh Festival last summer, and this was a revision of the same programme, with harpsichord accompaniment rather than strings. Handel's cantata Tu fedel? Tu costante?, exploring love and fidelity, was the centrepiece of the programme, and we framed it with songs by Blow, Humphrey, Purcell and Handel, and with solo harpsichord sonatas by Scarlatti. This new series exploits the beautiful space of Lincoln's Inn Chapel (annoying only for it's exceptionally high pews! – in every other respect quite stunning), and is a fundraising scheme for the Chancery Bar's Pro Bono Unit.