Saffron Hall celebrates World Piano Day with classical, jazz, film, the winner of The Piano, and a chance to Do It Yourself

Martin James Bartlett

World Piano Day is celebrated on the 88th day of the year to honour the 88 keys of the piano, so Saffron Hall is planning a celebratory Piano Day on Saturday 29 March 2025 with a variety of piano from classical to jazz to DIY in an around the hall.

Brad Kella, known for winning Channel 4's The Piano, will be giving to free concerts at Saffron Walden Town Hall. Martin James Bartlett, winner of the 2014 BBC Young Musician of the Year, is giving an afternoon concert at Saffron Hall performing music by Bach,  Schumann, Debussy and Gershwin, plus a selection of Schubert's Impromptus and ending with Ravel's La Valse.

Back at Saffron Walden Town Hall, jazz pianist and composer James Beckwith brings his unique blend of innovation and artistry to a relaxed evening of jazz. Whilst at Saffron Saffron in the evening, there is a showing of the film The Pianist, based on the autobiographical book The Pianist (1946), a memoir by the Polish-Jewish pianist, composer and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman.

Throughout the day, there are open sessions giving people the opportunity to play the Steinway at Saffron Hall or the piano at Audley End House.

Full details from the Saffron Hall website.

Bridging the gap: built with the largest single private donation to a state school & receiving no public funding, Saffron Hall celebrates ten years of artistic achievement & community engagement

Saffron Hall is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a weekend of celebratory events. The hall opened on 30 November 2013 with a season of just 12 concerts and from 1-3 December 2023 there is a whole range of celebratory events from jazz and soul, to Harry Bickett conducting the English Concert in Handel's Rodelinda, to Jess Gillam and the Britten Sinfonia, to sessions and workshops for children and families.

Located within the grounds of Saffron Walden County High School, the hall was built with the largest single private donation to a state school. Whilst the East of England region receives less arts funding compared to other parts of the UK, and Saffron Hall Trust receives no public funding, it has bridged the gap, offering performing arts and music to the local community and the entire region. Through broadening its programme, empowering and supporting amateur groups, establishing the region’s largest Saturday music school, reaching primary and secondary schools throughout the area and delivering flagship work for people living with dementia and their carers, Saffron Hall ensures that everyone has a chance to take part, engage, and experience arts and music that move, inspire, and connect.

From those initial 12 events, the hall now boasts a world-class music programme that includes two Resident Orchestras – London Philharmonic Orchestra and Britten Sinfonia – and presents around 125 events a year, spanning classical, fully staged opera, folk, big band, brass band, swing, jazz. As the only concert hall in Essex, it has seen exceptional audience growth and last year welcomed over 45,000 audience members, whilst over the past decade the hall has reached nearly 50,000 people through its education programmes.

Full details from the hall's website.

Saffron Hall's new season: from resident orchestras & distinguished visitors to Saffon Opera Group, plus Saffron Sessions, Saffron Foyer, and Saffron Sounds

Saffron Hall (Photo from visitessex.com)

Saffron Hall has announced its programme for Autumn 2022, from 11 September 2022 to 2 January 2023, with the return of the hall’s resident orchestras – Britten Sinfonia and London Philharmonic Orchestra – plus visits from the Dunedin Consort, English Touring Opera, Hallé Orchestra, Tenebrae and The Sixteen, with soloists and conductors including Karina Canellakis, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner, Jess Gillam, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Courtney Pine, Zoe Rahman and Anoushka Shankar.

The hall is also launching Saffron Sessions, a programme of creative, boundary-challenging performances including American pianist and composer Chad Lawson, Manchester Collective and Pekka Kuusisto. Also the informal Saffron Foyer nights return with jazz and folk artists including Katriona Taylor, Django’s Tiger and the Dan Forshaw Quartet.

However, performers don't just include distinguished visitors, there is plenty of local talent too. The season opens with Saffron Opera Group in Wagner’s Tannhäuser with tenor Peter Auty in the title role and Samantha Crawford as Elisabeth, conducted by Michael Thorne. Saffron Walden Choral Society perform Haydn’s Creation with Chameleon Arts Orchestra, whilst the Saffron Walden Symphony Orchestra returns with violinist Alex Redington for a programme including Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s Symphony No.12 commemorating the 1917 revolution.

The hall is launching the second iteration of its education initiative Saffron Sounds. This is a an online resource hub, including filmed performances and demonstrations from the Jess Gillam ensemble, which will be available to all primary schools, and will be the starting point for a programme of workshops and live performances offered to schools across Essex and beyond. Artists from across the programme, including A4 Brass, will visit local primary schools for performances. 

This Autumn will also see the introduction of A morning with… events for secondary schools, featuring performances, masterclasses and Q&A’s from artists including Isata Kanneh-Mason. And Saffron Hall Trust continues to deliver Together in Sound - its music therapy programme for those living with dementia and their carers in Saffron Walden. Together in Sound is delivered in partnership with the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research at Anglia Ruskin University, and a pilot programme is now also underway in Braintree in partnership with Braintree District Museum. 

Saffron Hall is a 740-seat concert hall that opened in 2013 as a sustainable model of arts and community outreach. Sited in the grounds of Saffron Walden County High School, a comprehensive school in North Essex, Saffron Hall’s programme runs alongside an extensive Schools and Community programme. Since opening, the hall has engaged with over 40,000 participants and sold over 205,000 tickets, with 21% of audiences travelling 30 miles or more. 10% of tickets sold were to under 18s. Saffron Hall is a registered charity and receives no regular funding from the local authority or Arts Council England; it is solely reliant on donations from individuals, trusts and foundations and ticket sales.

 Full details from the Saffron Hall website.

Benedetti Sessions return to in-person events at Saffron Hall with virtual sessions continuing for those unable to attend

Nicola Benedetti leading one of the Benedetti Foundation's sessions

For the first time since March 2020, the Benedetti Foundation will be running in-person Benedetti Sessions this weekend. From 24 to 26 September 2021 there are live Benedetti Sessions at Saffron Hall. During sessions will be delving into the fundamental elements of Baroque music, focusing on a new arrangement of Geminiani’s La Folia, approaching the music in a way that inspires fun and enjoyment, a greater sense of togetherness, a true abandonment of caution, and an embracing of scratches, scrapes and unapologetic flair, as well as connecting to dance and rhythm, to harmony, bass, and improvisation.

These sessions are limited to people from counties around Saffron Hall, but worry not because the foundation's on-line session are returning too and for the first time all Mini Sessions will be available to registered participants on catch up for one month. The Mini Virtual Sessions are short, focused workshops designed to provide in depth and detailed exploration on a wide variety of topics, and if anyone is unable to attend live, participants can still register and will receive a link to the recording to catch up in their own time. Teachers and students can also sign up for a ‘Sessions Pass’ to get access to all their sessions. 

Full details from the Benedetti Foundation website.

Music and Maths explored in the Oxford Philharmonic's innovative concert with Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy

Music & Maths - Debussy Prélude de l’après-midi d’une faune, Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements, Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, BB 114; Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Marios Papadopoulos; Saffron Hall
Reviewed by Colin Clarke and Carl Dowthwaite on 16 October 2019 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★)
Music and Maths, an exploration of the mathematics behind the music, a lecture with live music or a concert with extended introductions.

Under the title Music and Maths, Marios Papadopoulos and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra presented a programme of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartók at Saffron Hall on 16 October 2019 at which they were joined by Marcus du Sautoy who discussed each work in the programme from a mathematical point of view. This review is a joint one by a music reviewer, our regular contributor Colin Clarke, and a mathematician, Carl Dowthwaite.

Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He also (rather reassuringly) holds the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. Linked to the latter is his first non-academic book, The Music of the Primes, which was followed by Finding Moonshine (the latter an exploration of symmetry in our lives), The Num8er Mysteries, What we cannot know and How to Count to Infinity, amongst others.

In this collaboration with the Oxford Philharmonic, Professor du Sautoy discussed each work from a number of perspectives, at the heart of which was the idea of the “secret garden” of maths. “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without it being aware that it is counting” was the starting point, a quote from the Enlightenment polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716). As du Sautoy rightly pointed out, while mathematics is the science of patterns, music is the art of patterns. A scale is a pattern, and with his opening descent of his Prélude de l’après-midi d’une faune, Debussy issues a challenge to composers to think again about how we conceptualise musical language.

The basis of Western musical language is the overtone series (beautifully illustrated via a volunteer from the audience and a skipping rope plus instruments of the orchestra). How we divide the scales in the way we do was du Sautoy’s starting point. This journey that took us from Pythagoras all the way to the Modes of Limited Transposition: Number One, the whole-tone scale, is very much part of Debussy’s language (think the opening four bars of “Voiles” from the first book of Préludes, for example); the octatonic scale, the second Mode of Limited Transposition, has huge importance in Stravinsky, including in the piece we heard, the Symphony in Three Movements. And with this, the importance of patterns was brought to our attention.

Bringing classical Canada to the UK - Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra on tour

Alexander Shelley & the National Arts Centre Orchestra

Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra is touring Europe this month, and its first stop is the UK with concerts and outreach events from 10 May to 14 May. The full tour takes in five countries and seven cities, with events in Saffron-Walden, London, Paris, Utrecht, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Conducted by Alexander Shelley, the tour is celebrating the orchestra's 50th anniversary. The orchestra's UK concerts are at Saffron Hall (12 May 2019) and Cadogan Hall (14 May 2019) when the music performed will include Serbian-Canadian composer Ana Sokolović's Golden slumbers kiss your eyes (a new song cycle on themes of childhood nostalgia and time forever lost with counter-tenor David DQ Lee), alongside Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki, plus music by Dvorak.

The orchestra is also participating in a number of educational and engagement activities. It will be in residence at the Royal College of Music (13 & 14 May 2019) for chamber music coaching session, a conducting workshop, mock-audition session, and an event which will connect Brent District School band in London, England and OrKidstra, in Ottawa, Canada digitally in real time!

The National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa, Canada is home to NAC Orchestra, English Theatre, French Theatre, Indigenous Theatre and Dance, as well as showcasing established and emerging Canadian artists. The National Arts Centre Orchestra was founded in 1969 as the resident orchestra of the newly opened NAC, and its music director since 2015 is the London-born conductor Alexander Shelley. Past music directors have included Trevor Pinnock and Pinchas Zuckerman



Further information from the orchestra's website.

Mark Simpson & friends at Saffron Hall

Mark Simpson (Photo Kaupo Kikkas)

BBC Radio 3's Big Chamber Weekend returns to Saffron Hall on 26 & 27 April 2019 with a series of concerts featuring composer & clarinettist Mark Simpson. Simpson is joined by cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, pianist Richard Uttley, the Navarra Quartet, violist Adam Newman and trumpeter Simon Höfele, for a trio of concerts. 

The first concert features an intriguing sequence, Schumann's Märchenerzählungen, then Kurtág's Hommage à Robert Schumann and Mark Simpson's own Hommage à Kurtág, with the programme completed by music from Beethoven and Janáček. The free early-evening concert on the Saturday features an all-English programme including music by Ireland, Maxwell Davies and Howells, and the Saturday evening concert is American themed, with a new piece by Mark Simpson, Georges Antheil's Sonata for Trumpet and Bernstein's Sonata for Clarinet alongside music by Gershwin, Barber and Copland.

Full details from the Saffron Hall website.

Enticing programme: RVW, Bernstein & Emma-Ruth Richards

Politican John Bright, whose words are used
in RVW's Dona Nobis Pacem

On Saturday 2 December 2017 the choir of King's College, Cambridge joins the Britten Sinfonia for an enticing programme at the Barbican which pairs RVW's Dona Nobis Pacem with Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, conducted by Stephen Cleobury with soloists Ailish Tynan (soprano) and Neal Davies (baritone). The programme also includes the world premiere of Emma-Ruth Richards' Sciamachy. The programme will be repeated at Saffron Hall on 16 February 2018.

Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, written for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals Festival in Chichester and commissioned by the then Dean of Chichester, the Very Rev. Walter Hussey, have proved one of Bernstein's most enduringly popular works perhaps because Bernstein based some of the music in the piece on discarded and unused material from his musical theatre works.

RVW's cantata Dona Nobis Pacem was premiered bythe Huddersfield Choral Society in 1936, and unlike some of the composer's more abstract works of the period, does have an explicit link to the international situation at the time. The text combines sections of the Latin mass with poems by Walt Whitman, sections of the Book of Jeremiah and a parliamentary speech by the politician John Bright (RVW speculated that it was the first time such a speech had been set to music).

The concert opens with the world premiere of Emma-Ruth Richards’s Sciamachy for chamber orchestra, directed by Britten Sinfonia leader Jacqueline Shave. Commissioned by the William Alwyn Foundation with support from individual donors to Britten Sinfonia’s Musically Gifted crowd-funding scheme, Sciamachy (taken from the Greek ‘skiamakhia’ meaning ‘fighting your shadow’) draws on the themes of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms to journey through various fields of peace, conflict and resolution.

Full details from the Barbican website.

Premiere of Sally Beamish's The Judas Passion

Sally Beamish

The Judas Passion, Sally Beamish's new piece to a libretto by David Harsent, premieres at the Saffron Hall on Sunday 24 September 2017. Nicholas McGegan conducts the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment (OAE) with the Choir of the Enlightenment and soloists Julia Doyle (Mar), Brenden Gunnell (Judas) and James Newby (Christ).

The piece tells the story of the crucifixion from the point of view of Judas. The intriguing combination of contemporary composer and period instruments will echo Bach's passions in its exploration of the Last Supper and the events of Holy Week. Harsent's libretto asks us to reconsider Judas and poses some very different questions. Was what he did necessary? Could he have done any differently? And can he be forgiven?

The work is repeated at St John's Smith Square on Monday 25 September 2017.

Full details from the OAE website.

Looking ahead: New season at Saffron Hall

Saffron Hall

Since Saffron Hall opened in 2013 it has sold 90,000 tickets to more than 250 events, and reached 19,000 young people through its learning, participation and education work. The hall's 2017/2018 season has recently been announced including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment as featured ensemble, continuing residency from Britten Sinfonia, Saffron Hall debuts from Mirga Grazinytė-Tyla with the City of Birmingham Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, OAE, Il Pomo d’Oro with Alina Ibragimova, Emerson Quartet, and Mitsuko Uchida, and a return from English Touring Opera.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will be giving the world première of Sally Beamish's large-scale choral work The Judas Passion with a libretto by David Harsent, with soloists Julia Doyle, Brendan Gunnell and James Newby, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, then at Christmas the orchestra will be joined by Trinity College Choir for Bach's Christmas Oratorio

The Britten Sinfonia's concerts include Brahms Symphony No. 1 with Mark Elder, and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, RVW's Dona Nobis Pacem and a new work by Emma-Ruth Richards with Stephen Cleobury and King's College Choir. English Touring Opera will be performing Handel's Giulio Cesare, and Rameau's Dardanus as well as a performance of Bach's Mass in B minor involving local schools.

Saffron Opera Group's Ring Cycle comes to a triumphant conclusion with Götterdämmerung. Saffron Walden Choral Society joins forces with Harlow Chorus, the Choristers of Jesus College, Cambridge and the Chameleon Arts Orchestra for Britten’s War Requiem on Armistice Day with soloists Erica Eloff, Robin Tritschler and Peter Harvey, and it presents a singing day celebrating Mozart for participants of every level. Saffron Walden Symphony Orchestra perform ‘Around the World in 60 Minutes’, a concert for families with narrator and illustrator James Mayhew, conducted by Richard Hull.
Learning and participation includes a new series of free courses for people living with dementia and their carers, with music therapists from Anglia Ruskin University. This series builds on the work Saffron Hall began last season to use the power of music to help enrich the lives of people affected by the condition.

Full details from the Saffron Hall website.

Going from strength to strength - Saffron Hall's 2016-17 season

Vladimir Jurowski & the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Saffron Hall - photo Roger King

Saffron Hall seems to be going from strength to strength. Attendance at the hall has tripled in just two seasons, and they have just announced a strong 2016-17 season. I went along to hear chief executive Angela Dixon’s presentation of the new season, which took place at an evening for the hall’s members (on 9 May 2016), a testament to the growth of local support. We were also treated to music from two of the young artists appearing in concert during the 2016-17 season, guitarist Sean Shibe and pianist Richard Uttley. Sean Shibe played two fantasies by John Dowland and movements from Walton’s Five bagatelles, whilst Richard Uttley gave us a Chopin nocturne and Mark Simpson’s Barkham Fantasy which was written specially for Uttley (see my review of Uttley's recording of the work). Both artists' performances showed off the hall's critically acclaimed acoustics, achieving a real intimacy of sound.

The 2016-17 season will be opened by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with violinist Nicola Benedetti. The LPO is one of a number of major groups who are returning to play at the hall, and the season also sees the return of the English Concert directed by Rachel Podger. Other major groups include Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra whose programme includes Leonard Elschenbroich performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto, plus Yurki Temirkanov and the St Peterburg Philharmonic Orchestra who will be joined by Nikolai Lugansky in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the theme of Paganini. Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort will make their Saffron Hall debut with Bach’s Easter Oratorio.

As the hall is based within Saffron Walden County High School, Education plays a large part in the hall’s programme, so that Nicola Benedetti doesn’t just perform but works with the local school children. Last season as a result of one of her sessions she inspired a group of children to work on with the hall sponsoring them for lessons. Whilst Gabrieli are at the hall there will be a project with Gabrieli Roar which hopes to get the entire school singing!