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| Adam Possener winner of 19 to 25 years category NCEM Young Composers Award for 2022 |
The NCEM Young Composers Award for 2022, presented in partnership with BBC Radio 3, was live-streamed on 19 May 2022. The winner in the 19 to 25 years category was Adam Possener with 52°N 20.5° E and the 18 years and under category winner was Christopher Churcher with Arborescent.
Compositions by the young eight finalists at the Awards were played by former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists Consone Quartet – who specialise in performances with period instruments using gut strings. The programme for the concert also included String Quartet in D, op 71 no.2 by Franz Josef Haydn.
Christopher Churcher’s Arborescent and Adam Possener’s 52°N 20.5° E will be premiered by the Consone Quartet at Stour Music festival on Friday 24 June 2022 and recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Early Music Show.
Full details from the Young Composers Award website
The Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) held its first live public auditions finals for two years at Wigmore Hall on 19 May 2022. Eight finalists had been chosen from over 150 applicants and the winner was Israeli clarinet player Jonathan Leibovitz, who is currently completing his studies at the Music Academy in Basel with François Benda, and who will now join the YCAT roster.
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| Jonathan Leibovitz |
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| Carlo Gesualdo |
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| Saint-Saens: Samson et Dalila - Royal Opera House (Photo ROH / Clive Barda) |
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| Saint-Saens: Samson et Dalila Elīna Garanča, SeokJong Baek Royal Opera House (Photo ROH / Clive Barda) |
Designs were clean, spare and abstract so that Hyemi Shin's sets created some intriguing shapes. We were in some sort of totalitarian regime. Nothing was specific, though the Hebrews were clearly a Jewish community in the 20th century and during the prelude, we saw orange clad soldiers terrorising the Hebrew people. This modernisation apart, Jones has kept to the opera's plot but with a couple of extra twists to the dramaturgy. In Act One, Dalila's appearance was alone, not with a chorus of girls (this music is sung by the Hebrew women making offerings of thanks to Samson) and she did a seductive solo, and the production rather worked at setting Dalila apart from the Philistines. Her behaviour in Act Two was partly explained by having the High Priest (here a rather sinister General), show her Abimelech's body whilst at the end of that act, Samson's final cry was not in response to having his hair cut but to seeing the body of his beloved Rabbi (the Old Hebrew in the original).
This all worked and by the interval (after Act Two), thanks to some fine performances, we were hooked and intrigued. Jones' Big Idea for Act Three was to re-run the staging of Act One but with roles reversed and gaudier costumes; the opening scene with Samson mirrored the High Priest's scene, then the lead in to the Bacchanal was the same as Dalila's scene in Act One except this time Dalila was having offerings made to her, and the 'seductive' dance was done by the male dancers and then the whole chorus. At this point, the production lost me.
One of Handel's pasticcios revived for the first time since the 18th century, giving us a chance to hear some striking music in terrific performances from a young cast.
The 18th century's fondness for operatic pasticcio seems rather strange to us nowadays. We happily accept musical theatre created out of pre-existing songs, but still have too much of the Wagnerian idea of an opera as a sacrosanct work of art. In the 18th century opera was a far more malleable thing. For a start, an impresario in London wishing to put on Hasse's Cajo Fabricio would need access to the score, which generally meant access to the composer. This was Handel's problem in 1733, and his solution was a typically pragmatic 18th century one. Thanks to the traveller Edward Holdsworth (who knew Handel's friend and librettist Charles Jennens), Handel possessed a songbook from Hasse's opera along with the libretto. From these Handel planned to create a new opera, with Hasse's arias, Handel's new recitatives and orchestration.
Thanks to considerable scholarship, the resulting opera Caio Fabbricio received its first performance in modern times on 24 May 2022 at St George's Hanover Square, when Bridget Cunningham directed London Early Opera with soloists Anna Harvey, Ildiko Allen, Kieran Rayner, Anna Gorbachyova-Ogilvie, Thalie Knights, Hannah Poulsom and Phoebe Haines.
Handel premiered Caio Fabbricio in December 1733, the first season of his opera company following the split with the Opera of the Nobility. This split is why Handel was worrying about pasticcios, he had a complete season to present and, unlike previously, there was only him to write the operas (the original Royal Academy of Music had had a team of composers). The London audience liked novelty, and instead of a raft of revivals, Handel chose to create new works from old music; it was quicker and it enabled him to include the soloists' favourite arias as well.
18th century operas were always adjusted to suit the cast, rather than the present method of selecting the cast to suit the opera. Handel did this with his own operas; with Caio Fabbricio he had rather a different line-up of singers to the original, and the resulting work uses 13 of Hasse's 21 arias along with others. What all the composers have in common is that they were from the younger generation of Italian composers of the Neapolitan school, writing arias that were melodic and often simpler than Handel's large-scale structures. This was music the audience could come out humming.
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| Paul Patterson whose 75th birthday is celebrated at this year's JAM on the Marsh |
The festival is celebrating composer Paul Patterson's 75th birthday by performing his The Fifth Continent, a JAM commission from 2005 that evokes the dramatic 20-mile coastal stretch of Romney Marsh. The work is being performed by the Holst Singers, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones (mezzo), Onyx Brass and Simon Hogan (organ).
Other birthdays celebrated include a double celebration for composer Judith Bingham's 70th and clarinettist Michael Collins' 60th, when Collins performs Bingham's Concerto for Clarinet with the London Mozart Players in a concert including Copland's Clarinet Concerto (written in 1950 for Benny Goodman) and music by Debussy and Grieg.
The Fibonacci Quartet is returning to the festival following a sell-out concert at last year's festival and the quartet will be performing in several concerts, working with an array of distinguished artists. Anna Tilbrook will be joining them for an all-Czech concert including music by Mahler, Janacek, Suk, Martinu and a rare performance of the Piano Quartet by London-based Czech composer Karel Janovický.
Full details from the festival website.
The Vache Baroque Festival, which takes place this year from 2 to 4 September 2022, has launched a new video series celebrating the work of women composers of the Baroque era. The videos will feature performances of music by the English composer (and wife of a baronet) Lady Mary Dering (1629-1704) who studied with Henry Lawes, the Italian composer Lucia Quinciani (c1566, fl 1611) the earliest known published female composer of monody, the Italian composer Francesca Caccini (1587-1641), daughter of a composer, she worked at the Florentine court and wrote the oldest surviving opera by a woman, French composer Julie Pinel (1710-1737), born into a family of composers and who published a collection of songs, English composere Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730-1765), born in England to Italian aristocratic parents, she may have studied with Geminiani, and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-1676/78), a cloistered nun who wrote music for her convent.
The first video appeared [on YouTube] on Sunday 22 May 2022, soprano Hilary Cronin (winner of the 2021 International Handel Singing Competition) accompanied by Asako Ogawa on harpsichord and Jenny Bullock on viol in Julie Pinel's Chantez, dansez jeunes bergères, and there will be a new video every fortnight until 31 July.
See the festival's YouTube channel for future videos.
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| Daniel Pioro and Erland Cooper |
This year's composer in residence is Julian Philips and alongside a retrospective of Philips' works there is the Welsh premiere of Looking West, a major new concert-theatre work performed by Rebecca Bottone soprano, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones mezzo, Alexander Knox actor, Nova Music Opera Ensemble, George Vass conductor.
Alongside this there is a fine selection new works by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, David Matthews, Tarik O’Regan, Aileen Sweeney, Huw Watkins and 2022 Royal Philharmonic Society Young Composer, Rylan Gleave, plus commissions from Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade and Sarah Frances Jenkins, artists currently supported by the Presteigne Festival’s ‘Evolve’ and ‘Emerge’ composer mentoring schemes.
Alongside this new music, there are works by Bach, Beethoven, Elgar, Fauré, Hindemith, Ireland, Ravel, Schoenberg, Schubert, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Walton, plus cabaret, spoken word, exhibitions and more.
Full details from the festival website.
.jpg "Mad Song performing at last year’s High Barnet Chamber Music Festival, Anita Monserrat singing (photo Ruari Paterson-Achenbach)") |
| Mad Song performing at last year’s High Barnet Chamber Music Festival, Anita Monserrat singing (photo Ruari Paterson-Achenbach) |
The festival opens on 2 July 2022 with the New London Orchestra performing music by Ailsa Dixon and Schoenberg, plus Benjamin Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings with Annemarie Federle (horn) and Brenton Spiteri (tenor). Other concerts include the Echéa Quartet in Elisabeth Lutyens' String Quartet No. 6 plus quartets by Bartok and Mendelssohn, the ensemble Mad Song in music by Mazzoli, Saariaho, Tower, Causton, Monk Feldman, and Reich, and the festival ends on 17 July with cellist Ben Tarlton and pianist Robin Green in sonatas by Beethoven and Rachmaninov, plus Nadia Boulanger's Three Pieces for Cello and Piano.
Full details from the festival website.
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| Smyth: The Wreckers - Karis Tucker - Glyndebourne (Photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
So, The Wreckers would be an achievement by a long chalk, but unfortunately the work has had a spattered history. Smyth was very much a European, trained in Leipzig her friends were all Europeans and her early career was all in Continental Europe. When the Great War started in 1914, she had three major productions of her operas in progress or planned. At a stroke her European career was over, and she never wrote another large scale opera. The Wreckers, marooned in England with an inferior English libretto rather struggled. Warwick University's performance in 1983, directed by Graham Vick, remains a vivid memory for me but subsequent encounters with the opera have been more mixed. Duchy Opera very sensibly commissioned a revised English libretto from Amanda Holden, yet still the opera languished.
Glyndebourne announced Smyth's The Wreckers for 2020, and thankfully the company has kept faith and Melly Still's production of the opera opened Glyndebourne's 2022 season on Saturday 21 May 2022. The work was performed in a new edition which returned it to Smyth's original manuscript, and used Henry Brewster's original French libretto. Karis Tucker was Thurza (Thirza), Rodrigo Porras Garulo was Marc, Philip Horst was Pasko, Lauren Fagan was Avis with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Donovan Singletary, and James Rutherford. Designs were by Ana Ines Jabares-Pita, choreography by Mike Ashcroft, lighting by Malcolm Rippeth, and video by Akhila Krishnan. Robin Ticciati conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
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| Smyth: The Wreckers - Glyndebourne (Photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
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| Purcell: Dido & Aeneas - Katey Rylands, Sonny Fielding - HGO (Photo Laurent Compagnon) |
An imaginative updating of the two 17th century English classics with a very fine young cast.
Henry Purcell was John Blow's pupil and the two were friends as well as colleagues. It has long been accepted that Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas was influenced by Blow's Venus and Adonis. The two works being the earliest surviving English language operas, as well as some of the greatest. Recent scholarship has shown other intriguing links between them. Venus and Adonis was written for performance at the court of King Charles II, whilst the only known performance of Dido and Aeneas was at Josiah Priest's school for young ladies in Chelsea. It has long been postulated that there was an earlier grander performance of Dido and Aeneas, and we now know that Venus and Adonis was also performed at Josiah Priest's school, suggesting clear links between court performance and the school.
These experiments in English opera seem not to have been a great success, we have to wait until the early 18th century for further major English works. Blow wrote no more opera, and Purcell's other large-scale stage work are in the awkward semi-opera vein. Whilst the two works might seem an obvious double bill, they are rarely played together.
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| Blow: Venus & Adonis - Elizabeth Green, Conall O'Neill - HGO (Photo Laurent Compagnon) |
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| Noemi Gyori and Gergely Madaras (Photo Benjamin Ealovega) |
The two have returned to playing the flute together and with pianist Alexander Ullman have recently issued a disc of music for two flutes by the Doppler brothers (Karl and Franz) and Friedrich Kuhlau on the Rubicon label. I recently met up with Gergely and Noemi by Zoom to discuss the importance of the Dopplers to flautists, rediscovering the joy of playing together again during lockdown, and how they balance their musical life with married life.
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| Franz Doppler by Ágost Elek Canzi (1853) |
The idea of two flutes playing together was common during the Baroque era (where they would be joined by continuo instruments), but the prominence of the Dopplers' music for flute comes partly from the way the instrument seemed to drift out of fashion. There is plenty of flute repertoire from Quantz, WF Bach and CPE Bach right through to Mozart and his contemporaries, and there are even arrangements of music from Mozart's operas for two flutes! But then there is a chunk of repertoire missing. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the flute did not develop as quickly as other instruments and seemed to fall out of favour as a Romantic instrument. Theobald Boehm developed his flute in 1847, a design that radically altered the technical capability of the instrument and increased its volume too but which changed the fingerings and a lot of players were initially reluctant to switch. So, though the Baroque flute was a leading instrument of the day, Noemi feels that this lack of classical and early Romantic repertoire means that flautists today are constantly trying to prove that the instrument is as creative, meaningful and profound as solo instruments such as the violin or the clarinet (for her doctoral research, Noemi looked at the idea of redefining her instrument through newly created transcriptions of keyboard masterworks from the classical era).
Co-curated with conductor Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey and Afghan pianist and composer Arson Fahim, Spitalfields Music has commissioned Afghan musicians in exile or hiding to write new compositions and create arrangements of Afghan traditional songs which will be performed by a chamber orchestra of instruments from Afghanistan and the Western classical music tradition. The UK's first women and non-binary orchestra Her Ensemble performs music from Barbara Strozzi to Dobrinka Tabakova.
Voice trio celebrate the legacy of Hildegard of Bingen, juxtaposing her music with new works by Stevie Wishart, Marcus Davison, Emily Levy, Tim Young and Laura Moody. There is a rare chance to hear Biber’s virtuosic Mystery Sonatas played on baroque violin by Kazakh violinist Aisha Orazbayeva, whilst a talk from Professor James Sparks on Bach's mathematical genius, illustrated by a performance of the Goldberg Variations by City of London Sinfonia, pays homage to The Spitalfields Mathematical Society - a working men’s club founded in 1717. There will also be a chance to hear Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on pianola, performed by Rex Lawson
George Parris and The Carice Singer celebrate RVW's 150th anniversary with a performance of the Mass in G minor alongside the London premieres of works by James Batty, Michele Deiana, Will Harmer, Electra Perivolaris, Claire Victoria Roberts and Aileen Sweeney, as part of Spitalfields Music and Cheltenham Music Festival’s ongoing partnership. Composer and clarinettist Arun Ghosh presents the London premiere of his St Francis of Assisi-inspired Canticle of the Sun, Inner City Brass give the premiere of a new work by composer, trombonist and big band arranger Callum Au, and composer Neil Luck and filmmaker Hydar Dewachi are collaborating on the premiere of The Melting Ceremony. Soprano Juliet Fraser will collaborate with the Talea Ensemble live streamed directly from New York City to premiere Laura Bowler's Distance. George Barton, Siwan Rhys and Mira Benjamin will perform a concert celebrating composer Barbara Monk Feldman’s minimalist masterpieces.
The festival ends with a concert from Voces8 alongside the TUKS Camerata, a student choir from the University of Pretoria.
Full details from the festival website.
A rather magical disc in which classical guitarist and composer Sam Cave presents music by five contemporary composers that takes the guitar to some evocative and aetherial places
This disc from guitarist Sam Cave, Refracted Resonance on metier, features six contemporary works for classical guitar, each of which explores, in a different way, the possibilities of sound and texture that the instrument can offer. So we have Tristan Murail's Tellur, George Holloway's Guitar Sonata and Second Guitar Sonata, Christopher Fox's Chile, Horaţiu Rădulescu's Subconscious Wave and Sam Cave's own Refracted Meditations III.
Cave begins his introductory note in the CD booklet with a quotation from Julian Bream, made in a 1976 BBC documentary, "…plucked sound has a remarkable quality because the actual pluck is the apex of the sound, and thereafter it dies, and if you are playing a phrase of six or seven notes you are actually dealing with six or seven births and six or seven deaths….the excitement is also in the space between the notes and therein lies the poetry of plucked sound…". And it is this concept, these concepts that are embodied in much of the music here.
For its artists, the festival brings together a mixture of professional musicians, those at the start of their career, and several who may still be studying, and this year's line up is Beatrice Philips - violin and Artistic Director, Bengt Forsberg - piano, Adam Newman - viola, Alasdair Beatson - piano, Bogdan Božović - violin, Amy Norrington - cello, Lilli Maijala - viola, Vashti Hunter - cello, Tim Crawford - violin, Hannah Sloane - cello, Matt Hunt - clarinet, Mary Bevan - soprano, Hannah Shaw - viola, Venetia Jollands - violin, and the Eusebius Quartet.
And the programme mixes the well-known and the lesser known so that alongside Elgar's Quartet and Piano Quintet there is Enescu's Octet and his Toccata from his Suite, plus Beethoven, Schubert including the Notturno, Quintet in C major, Brahms' Clarinet Quintet, and Fauré alongside music by Chausson, Lili Boulanger, Zemlinsky, Berg, Bliss, Kate Whitley and Jorg Widmann. And lots else besides.
Full details from the festival website.
A delightful disc that explores the music of early America with its mixed and varied influences from songs from Vauxhall to shape-note singing
This lovely disc takes you to a world that is at once strange yet familiar. Three Notch'd Road: The Virginia Baroque Ensemble, performs the music of early America on Shining Shore. The disc features Steuart Pincombe (baroque cello), Michelle Pincombe (soprano), Peter Walker (vocalist, English guitar, cittern, Appalachian dulcimer, harp), Dominic Giardino (historical clarinet) and Fiona Hughes (artistic director, baroque violin, alto, harp) in music by Purcell, Handel, Jeremiah Ingalls, Thomas Baltzar, T. Ravenscroft, A Davisson, Oliver Shaw, Charles Thomas Carter, William Walker, and George Frederic Root. Some will be familiar names, but many will not.
Named for a colonial route through central Virginia, Three Notch’d Road: The Virginia Baroque Ensemble specializes in the performance of historical repertoires from both sides of the Atlantic. Shining Shore explores the group's own Virginia heritage, presenting music from the 17th to the 19th centuries that might have been heard in Virginia. In the booklet note they say that their purpose in making this recording was "to open to the listener beauties of a time and place far from our own, both strange and strangely familiar. " And of course, making the disc in 2020 meant that "these songs’ texts about mortality and hope held a deep significance for us."
.jpg "Three Notch'd Road: The Virginia Baroque Ensemble") |
| Three Notch'd Road: The Virginia Baroque Ensemble |
A series of micro concerts by the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, conducted by Kent Nagano, explored new ways and methods of listening to music at the time of the world pandemic through video technology. Therefore, in cooperation with a team of international video artists, a cycle of five audio-visual concerts responded to the times of the crisis. Originally streamed by Radio France, the videos have now become available for on-line viewing on the channels of the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg and Staatsoper Hamburg.
Classical concert music and video art usually have few points of contact as visual broadcasts of orchestral concerts usually opt for a documentary format, the camera following the flow of the music showing performers, instruments and so forth in stark contrast to video technology in pop music which has enjoyed decades of evolution producing its own aesthetic forms. Therefore, in five compact micro concerts, each one lasting about 30 minutes, Kent Nagano, in association with Georges Delnon and the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, have fused classical music and contemporary video art corresponding to the phases of the world pandemic over the past couple of years.
A formidable team of international video artists, chosen by Georges Delnon (artistic director of the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg and Staatsoper Hamburg) undertook the detailed task of visualising the programmes. The artists comprised Luis August Krawen, Jonas Englert, Zbig Rybczyński & Dorota Zglobicka, Kamila B. Richter & Michael Bielicky and Virgil Widrich. ‘We didn’t want to produce the nth streamed concerts,’ said Kent Nagano, ‘but offer viewers new images, leaving space for associative imagination’ while Georges Delnon, describing the project’s visual concept, had this to say: ‘Elements include avatars such as an animated Kent Nagano, distorted footage of the orchestra, webcam recordings and ‘‘found footage’’ thereby lending some of the music a completely new horizon for listeners and viewers alike.’
For Kent Nagano, the project was (and remains) close to his heart and it offered a chance to emphasise how important, relevant and necessary music can be in times of crisis: ‘The micro concerts are a kind of musical UFO,’ explained Maestro Nagano, ‘not resembling any known project. Each concert transports a message and tells a story showing how deeply music is rooted in society today, a special project, modern in structure and form, that could only have happened during the pandemic. In fact, the visualisation makes each micro concert a real creation.’
Overall, there was a total of 25 works recorded including music by Widmann, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, Villa-Lobos, Dutilleux and Xenakis. Kent Nagano and the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg were joined by such international performers as Klaus Florian Vogt who sang Mahler’s ‘Von der Jugend’ while Katharina Konradi, Jana Kurucová and Georg Nigl interpreted Ligeti’s avant-garde work ‘Nouvelles aventures’. Members of Staatsoper Hamburg comprised Hellen Kwon, Gabriele Rossmanith, Kristina Stanek, Kady Evanyshyn and Bernhard Hansky sang works by Bartók and Schoenberg while invited ensembles - Harvestehuder Kammerchor Hamburg and Rundfunkchor Berlin - were heard in pieces by Brahms and Schoenberg.
The micro concerts are available on-line (on demand) to 22 October 2022 via the orchestra's website, their YouTube channel, and the France Musique website.
%20Alex%20Brenner,%20no%20use%20without%20credit,%20Arcola%20-%20Die%20Walkure%20@%20Hackney%20Empire%20(_1DC0091_dx).jpg "Wagner: Die Walküre - Bethan Langford, Elizabeth Karani, Katie Stevenson - Arcola Theatre's Grimeborn Festival at Hackney Empire in 2021 (Photo Alex Brenner)") |
| Wagner: Die Walküre - Bethan Langford, Elizabeth Karani, Katie Stevenson - Arcola Theatre's Grimeborn Festival at Hackney Empire in 2021 (Photo Alex Brenner) |
The festival opens with Ensemble OrQuesta's modern interpretation of Monteverdi's L’Incoronazione di Poppea. Then following the festival's productions of Das Rheingold in 2019 [see my review] and Die Walküre in 2021 [see my review], they return to the Hackney Empire for the final two episodes of the Ring Cycle in Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's adaptation.
Thanks to Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms, this is rather turning into Ethel Smyth year (hurrah!) so it is delightful that Spectra Ensemble's 2018 production of Smyth's The Boatswain's Mate is returning to Grimeborn [see my review]. Other unusual repertoire includes The Cervantes Theatre in the UK première of Black, el payaso, Pablo Sorozobal's zarzuela which debuted in Spain in 1942, whilst Opera at Home are pairing Walton's The Bear with Daniel Felsenfeld's I decided...
New opera and work in progress includes John Michael Maloney's Sin the Musical from Dmii Productions, Kristina Arakelyan's Penelope (Work in Progress), What More? Production's mixture of Japanese and British Sign Language of Deaf performers in Sumida River and Red Gray & Sarah Nicholls' The Unravelling Fantasia of Miss H. which explores the Victorian mental health system.
Classic operas in the season include Bizet's Carmen in Leo Geyer's bold re-imagining for Baseless Fabric Theatre, Mozart's The Magic Flute in Lindsay Bramley's version for Opera Alegria, Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore in a radical rethink from Emma Jude Harris, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle from environmentally sustainable opera company Green Opera.
The Grimeborn Festival runs from 26 July to 10 September at the Arcola Theatre and the Hackney Empire. Full details from the Arcola Theatre website.
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| Delos (Photo Tilo Krause) |
On 30 May 2022, the European Youth Orchestra (EUYO) will be joined by soloists Diana Tishchenko (violin) and Sokratis Sinopoulos (lyra), plus Ukrainian and Russian musicians for a concert including Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Carmen Fizzarotti's Floating Autumn from The [uncertain] Four Seasons and Marshall Marcus' 17 Strokes of the Bell for Peace and Sustainability. The venue for the concert is the Greek island of Delos.
The event is part of EUYO’s Peace in Europe project 2022 of seven peace concerts across Europe, and represents the inauguration of ALPHA MISSION - ΔELOS, an initiative that aims through the combined strengths of Mythology, Art and Space Technology to raise awareness globally about the urgent need for the regeneration of our planet.
The concert will be live-streamed on ARTE, on the social-media platforms of various cultural and technological institutions, and projected onto big screens in various cities around the world. It will be available on arte.tv from 30th May until end of August. The event also celebrates the 30th anniversary of ARTE, the European cultural channel.
The island of Delos, near Mykonos, near the centre of the Cyclades archipelago, was a holy sanctuary for a millennium before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, thus giving the island supreme importance. Changes of trade routes during the Roman era meant that that the island declined, however, and it was abandoned in the 8th Century AD. Currently it has around two dozen inhabitants, and the concert would seem to be the first such event on the island since ancient times.
Full details from the EUYO website.
.jpeg "The lake stage at West Green House Opera in 2021") |
| The lake stage at West Green House Opera in 2021 |
Kirsty is perhaps best known as a long time member of The Sixteen and she remains firmly with the ensemble but her links to West Green House Opera go a long way back as she has sung in various events there, whilst her parents are staunch supporters of the company. A couple of years back, finding the combination of family life (Kirsty has a teenage daughter) and touring rather taxing, she decided to look for a second string to her bow.
West Green House Opera was created by Marylyn Abbott, whose resurrection of West Green's house and garden following the IRA bombing has been near miraculous. Marylyn remains firmly in harness but back in 2019/20 she was looking for someone to assist with marketing and administration. Marylyn and Kirsty's paths crossed at a dinner party and Kirsty started to assist with planning the 2020 season. Faced with pandemic cancellations, the company was able to use advance ticket sales to pay the artists something, but it did rather leave coffers dry.
Marylyn asked Kirsty to fix the 2020 concert series and these proved so popular that they continue. Come Autumn 2020, the question was what to do next year?
![Feodor Akimenko [Fedir Yakymenko]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcpdTi_keqkyEAPrFNrX3ij4BsALBJM29ejYuKHQyyfm3gszdMMe_iUnICDYTWU_X9w4I_8Jvd-UkRcJfdb8ihqU0IYMTl0PW6McRJ4v3O0ZDtdxZABc2G8gfqxs2EdQXH7hnIBVY_BDXYj65P2LJ_hIDy7eX0pKeZha1N90WMHcg3akiYWzA/s490/pic_Y_A_Yakymenko%20Fedir.jpg "Feodor Akimenko [Fedir Yakymenko]") |
| Feodor Akimenko [Fedir Yakymenko] |
Still focusing on Voices from the East, the season also includes several works by Reinhold Glière (1875-1956). Born in Kyiv, Ukraine of Polish and German parents, Glière [originally Glier] studied in Kyiv and in Moscow with Taneyev, Ippolitov Ivanov and Arensky. As a young man, Glière's private pupils included Myaskovsky and Prokofiev, and later his students included Vladimir Dukelsky (better known as the song-writer Vernon Duke). After 1917, Glière never visited Western Europe and also seemed to have been able to keep on the right side of the Soviet authorities. His style remained very tradition, and as the last genuine representative of the pre-revolutionary national Russian school, i.e. a 'living classic', Glière seemed immune to the standard reproach of "formalism" (mostly equivalent to "modernity" or "bourgeois decadence"). Thus the infamous events of 1936 and 1948 passed Glière by.
Other highlights of the season include horn player Felix Klieser returning as artist in residence, whilst two inclusive ensembles BSO Resound and RNS Moves join forces with composer Kate Whitley for a new work. RS Moves brings together disabled and non-disabled musicians including members of Royal Northern Sinfonia, and BSO Resound is a professional disabled-led ensemble made up of musicians led by James Rose.
Kirill Karabits conducts 16 performances during the orchestra's season, whilst Mark Wigglesworth returns as principal guest conductor and the orchestra is currently looking for a new assistant conductor.
Full details from the BSO website.
Villa Lobos' concerto was written in 1951, commissioned by the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, who gave the world premiere in 1956. The work went through a few changes, originally written as a Fantasia concertante, with no cadenza, Villa Lobos later added a cadenza and changed the name to concerto. Maria Teresa Carreno was a Venezuelan born pianist and composer who trained in the USA and Paris. Edward MacDowell was one of her pupils for a time and both he and Amy Beach dedicated works to Carreno.
Before the concert proper, there is a chance for young performers to shine. Members of Bath Festival Orchestra have been working with students from East London's Bobby Moore Academy for outreach activities, working to create the first orchestra in the school's history as well as giving a joint monthly lunchtime concert series at St Mary Le Strand Church. On 16 June, the school students will perform Villa Lobos' Bachianas Brasilias No. 2 ‘The Little Train of the Caipira’ arranged by Bobby Moore Academy’s Musician-in-Residence, Harry Baker.
Full details from the orchestra's website.
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| National Youth Jazz Orchestra |
But I do recollect a Fanfare ‘revival’ to launch the 2014 festival when artists from the festival joined staff of corporate sponsor Abellio Greater Anglia (now National Express East Anglia) to perform a birthday cake candle-extinguishing Fanfare at Norwich Thorpe Station with William Galinsky (festival director) and Jonathan Denby (corporate affairs director of the railway company) in the thick of it blowing crazily to a short off-the-cuff piece of music appropriately entitled Blow! What else! Happily, Jonathan’s still in the thick of it today. Long may it continue!
But back to the present and this year a group of nine young and enterprising UK-based composers (the Chosen Nine) were commissioned by the festival to create a series of Fanfares to herald in this year’s event marking the festival’s glorious 250th anniversary while, at the same time, recapture some of the glory of yesteryear and past musical treats such as ‘Old Timber’ so dearly loved.
The festival’s young, bright and alert music programmer, James Hardie, set the Chosen Nine - James Batty, Cameron Biles-Liddell, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, Nneka Cummins, Misha Mullov-Abbado, Laurence Osborn, Alexander Paxton, Shruthi Rajasekar, Ayanna Witter-Johnson - a time limit of 60 seconds for their respective pieces. And their inspiration for writing them ranged from Indian-influenced music to music inspired by prehistoric Norfolk not forgetting, of course, the jazz idiom and other such musical forms.
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| WNO Youth Opera in Brundibár in 2019 (Photo Johan Persson) |
WNO Youth Opera (10-18 years) will perform the creepy, comic opera, The Black Spider, written by composer Judith Weir, at the Weston Studio, Wales Millennium Centre. The production will be performed by a company of 50 singers aged 10 to 18, reuniting for their first live production since Brundibár in 2019. Based on Jeremias Gotthelf’s dark medieval tale Die Schwarze Spinn. Judith Weir created The Black Spider specifically for young people, combining, history, horror and comedy and the production will be directed by Rhian Hutchings and conducted by Dan Perkin.
WNO Youth Opera (18-25 years) will be presenting a new production of Shostakovich’s Cheryomushki, on the main stage of the Donald Gordon Theatre as part of WNO's Autumn Season. The work is a satirical, light-hearted operetta focuses on the housing shortage and the challenge of securing habitable conditions in 1950s Soviet Russia. It will be presented as Cherry Town, Moscow, directed by Daisy Evans and conducted by Alice Farnham.
Will Todd's Migrations receives its premiere as part of WNO's Summer Season and returns as part of the Autumn Season. Directed by Sir David Pountney, the opera will feature the forces of WNO’s orchestra and Chorus combined with The Renewal Gospel Choir, Bollywood dancers and traditional Indian musicians, plus a children's chorus featuring members of WNO Youth Opera (10-14).
The young people of WNO’s Youth Opera gain a fully professional and unique training experience working with WNO’s orchestra, designers, stage managers and technicians, helping develop and support their professional skills. The aspiring singers also receive mentoring and guidance from top industry professionals.
More about WNO Youth Opera at the WNO website, plus details of performances.
