Friday 31 August 2012

Kings Place Festival

Kings Place Festival 2012
This year's Kings Place Festival runs from 14 to 16 September and takes the familiar format, 100 concerts spread over three days, all concerts 45 minutes long and costing £4.50. With lots of free foyer events too. And there are some amazing things.


The players of the Aurora Orchestra are joining up with the Little Angel Theatre for Brahms with Puppets, something that seems aimed at children but is bound to appeal to all ages.

Cellist Matthew Barley is doing a pair of concerts with friends, including rather intriguingly the shakuhachi player Adrian Freedman. Another unusual instrument, the baryton, crops up in performances of Haydn's baryton trios performed by Rinat Ibragimov and other members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The Chilingirian Quartet perform more Haydn, rather excitingly paired with Enescu.

Stravinsky's The Soldier' Tale crops up twice, once in a performance from the London Sinfonietta and once in a lecture recital by Dimitry Sitkovetsky on his ongoing project to deconstruct the work and reconstruct it in a different form. Another work being re-imagined is Brahms's clarinet quintet which ZRI have reworked for a tavern ensemble, rich in the folk sounds which inspired the piece.

The lovely Mary Carewe is bringing her distinctive mix of Berlin cabaret, theatre songs and contemporary songs. And the Songmen give their own distinctive mix of a cappella music.

Young performers from the Royal Academy of Music are doing things in eights, with string octets by Mendelssohn and Shostakovich and wind octets by Stravinsky and Mozart.

A series of concerts intriguingly explores the relationship between Schubert's songs and drawings by the contemporary Austrian artists Martha Griebler. One of the concerts is fascinatingly entitled Moments of Bliss Illuminate the Dark. Performers include Kitty Whately and Njabula Madlala.

And besides music there is food, with cake decorating, wine tasting and cocktail mixing, plus the spoken word, comedy and much else.
Further details from www.kingsplace.co.uk/festival

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