Graham Johnson to receive Wigmore Hall medal

Graham Johnson
(c) Clive Barda

Graham Johnson has been awarded the 2013 Wigmore Hall medal 'in recognition of his unstinting championing of Song and his extraordinary achievements on the concert platform and in the recording studio'. The medal will be presented by John Gilhooly, the Director of the Hall, to Johnson during his concert on Saturday 13 April 2013 at the Wigmore Hall. The concert celebrates the launch of Graham’s three-volume encyclopaedia Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs, (published by Yale University Press). 

The concert features Schubert's settings of the British poets Colley Cibber, Abraham Cowley, 'Ossian' (James Macpherson), William Shakespeare and Walter Scott (including a complete performance of Seven Songs from Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake), as well as songs particularly associated with memories of the book’s dedicatees. The performers include Ailish Tynan, Sarah Connolly, Mark Padmore, Ben Johnson, Robin Tritschler and Christopher Maltman.

CLoSer - Poulenc and Paris

The City of London Sinfonia's CLoSer events are intended to present music in a different, more casual environment to the usual concert hall. They are part of a wider trend for ensembles to put on what might be called classical music club nights, with the intention of attracting a newer, different audience. The City of London Sinfonia presents their CLoSer events at the Village Underground in Shoreditch, a converted Victorian warehouse space used for a variety of concerts and club nights. The CLoSer Poulenc and Paris event on 10 April 2013 was also part of the City of London Sinfonia's Poulenc Festival, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. Stephen Layton conducted members of the City of London Sinfonia, with baritone Derek Welton and pianist Antoine Francoise, in Poulenc's Trois Mouvements perpetuels, Le bestiare, Rhapsodie negre and Le bal masque, plus Satie's Trois  Gymnopedies. Before the concert proper I attended a Q&A with City of London Sinfonia staff and players to talk about their CLoSer events.

Modern tides in East London

On Friday 12 April, the music collective Wolf Pack is presenting a 'contemporary music concert for the curious and creative' at the Chisendale Dance Space in East London (Chisendale Road, London E3 5QZ). They will be performing a new conceptual concert based on the them of the tide. The performances will include The Waves by the American composer and virtuoso pianist Frederic Rzewski. Also in the programme will be Floodtide by John Eacott, interpretations of songs written by Radiohead and Beach House, recent works by Gareth Churchill and Stephen Goss plus a commission from Daria Lipsinka.

BBC Music Magazine Awards

The BBC Music Magazine Awards were presented last night (9 April) at a ceremony at Kings Place. The Halle's live disc of Elgar's The Apostles with Rebecca Evans, Alice Coote, Paul Groves, Jacques Imbrailo, David Kempster and Brindley Sherratt conducted by Mark Elder, scooped both the Recording of the Year and the Choral Awards. The Opera Award went to the Early Opera company for their recording of Handel's  Alceste with Lucy Crowe, Benjamin Hulett and Andrew Foster-Williams conducted by Christian Curnyn. Angelika Kirschlager and Julius Drake's second volume of Liszt songs won the vocal award. Other winners included the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle (Orchestral and DVD), Trio Zimmerman (Chamber). Full details from the BBC Music Magazine Awards website.

Celebrations at the LSO

Having celebrated the 10th anniversary of LSO St Lukes, there is a brace of birthdays coming up at London Symphony Orchestra concerts. On 25 April 2013, John Eliot Gardiner conducts the LSO in a concert which includes Stravinsky's Apollon Musagete and Oedipus Rex with Jennifer Johnston, Stuart Skelton and Gideon Saks, in celebration of Gardiner's 70th birthday. Then on 22 May, Valery Gergiev celebrates his birthday with a concert including Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, and act five from Berlioz's The Trojans, plus music by Paganini, Ravel and Sarasate with Leonidas Kavakos (violin) and Alexander Toradze (piano). At next week's performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw (16, 17 April), the conductor will be Richard Farnes replacing Colin Davis who has been ill. The cast includes Andrew Kennedy, Sally Matthews and Catherine Wyn-Rogers. Further information from the LSO website.

Coming up at the Handel House Museum

The Handel House Museum's exhibition on Charles Jennens (see my review) closes on 14 April, but there are lots of other treats in store. Over the next few months concerts in the museum include opportunities to hear music by Handels friends and contemporaries like Telemann and Pepusch, plus explorations of his female muses including Mrs Cibber, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, as well as the more exotic castrato. As part of Museums at Night you can see the museum by candlelight, and there are new exhibitions to look forward to, celebrating the history of the building and a single year in Handel's life.. 

Songs about words

Soprano Juliet Fraser and pianist Mark Knoop are performing a programme of experimental song, Songs without words, at Turner Sims concert hall in Southampton (22 April 2013) and at The Forge in Camden (25 April). The concert includes works by Charles Ives, Mauricio Kagel and Laurence Power, plus a new song-cycle from Matthew Shlomowitz, the London-based Australian composer. He is co-director of the ensemble PlusMinus. The cycle is intriguingly called Songs about words and about the pleasure of misery five songs for soprano and piano. The Kagel pieces include Rrrr… and M.M.51 with Crane's Tour de France Statistics 1903-2003.

The perils of opera travel

A few years ago I noticed on the Welsh National Opera website, that the WNO were giving the world premiere of James Macmillan's The Sacrifice in Cardiff on the day of my partner's birthday, so booked tickets as a birthday treat. Now, we generally operate on the basis of sorting out the opera tickets and then booking the accommodation, in this case it was a mistake. The best offer of a room I could get was £900 for the penthouse at one of the big hotels, a bit out of our price range. Widening the search did notgood and finally I Googled the date, only to discover that one of the events in the Rugby World Cup was happening that day. We finally ended up staying in Bristol. Both before and after the opera we found the Cardiff full of hordes of Rugby fans out for a good time. And now, its happened again.

Giles Swayne - Stations of the Cross

In 2004 Bath Camerata under Nigel Perrin premiered Giles Swayne's Stabat Mater, a work which takes the crucifixion story and puts it in a contemporary Palestinian context, so that the grieving Mother of Christ is echoed by the grieving mothers of today. It was this work which was one of the origins of Swayne's organ piece, Stations of the Cross. In the Roman Catholic liturgy the Stations of the Cross are 14 meditations on the crucifixion which are performed regularly in Lent. I have sung in one or two of Swayne's pieces and he has a way of approaching the traditional from a striking new point of view. This new recording from Resonus Classics gives us Swayne's dramatic and thoughtful organ piece Stations of the Cross played by Simon Nieminski on the organ of St. Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral (RC), Edinburgh.

Radio 3 Composer of the Week - Joseph Horovitz and Gordon Jacob

Gordon Jacob

Next week (15 - 19 April), BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week programme will be featuring Joseph Horovitz (born 1926) and his teacher Gordon Jacob (1895 - 1984). Both have had a significant impact upon students at the Royal College of Music, and both have been prolific in writing concertos, and music for wind and brass. Gordon Jacob studied with Stanford and RVW, and composed over 400 works; he was known for his orchestration. His students included Malcolm Arnold, Frank Bury, Ruth Gipps, Imogen Holst, Cyril Smith, Philip Cannon and Robert Turner. Horovitz is perhaps best known for cantata Captain Noah and his floating zoo, his Lady Macbeth: a scena featured in Sarah Walker's 70th birthday concert (see my review). Horovitz will be joining presenter Donald Macleod to talk about his career and that of his teacher.

Summer at the Royal Academy

Summer term at the Royal Academy includes an interesting mix, with a number of themed series including Bach Cantatas, Haydn Symphonies and the double bass. Opera includes Dido and Aeneas, L'enfant et les sortileges and Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse as well as a pair of musicals.

Opera Awards

The inaugural Opera Awards take place next week, on 22 April, at the Hilton Hotel with awards being presented in 22 categories, the first time that the opera world has had such an event. The idea being to celebrate opera, and perhaps cause a buzz to a wider audience. The event will also be supporting the creating of bursaries to help support young talent.

The Sixteen - Choral Pilgrimage 2013

The Sixteen's annual Choral Pilgrimage has become something a fixture in the UK's classical music calendar, a programme of some of the greatest renaissance polyphony performed in some of the greatest renaissance buildings. It is a substantial enterprise, 16,000 people saw them last year and this year they perform at 36 venues over the year from Edinburgh, Perth and Carlisle to Lllandaff, Exeter and Truro. We caught up with them in St. Alban's Cathedral on Saturday 6 April 2013 (their third concert, the pilgrimage having started on 2 March in Guildford). The cathedral was full, in fact extra seating had been made available the day before. It is heartening that a group like the Sixteen can fill a church (900 people or more in the nave alone) with a programme of polyphony by Palestrina, Allegri and James MacMillan. The programme was titled The Queen of Heaven and themed around music to the Virgin Mary including Palestrina's Missa Regina caeli and his Stabat Mater, along with Allegri's Miserere and James MacMillan's setting of the same text.

Poeme d'un jour - Ailyn Perez and Iain Burnside

Ailyn Perez and Iain Burnside's recital disc is one of the first group of three issued by the new collaboration between Rosenblatt Recitals and Opus Arte. Ailyn Perez is a young American lyric soprano, of Mexican parentage, who has been garnering great plaudits. Her and Burnside's programme of French and Spanish song by Reynaldo Hahn, Fernando Obradors, Joaquin Turina, Gabriel Faure and Manuel de Falla plus opera arias by Jules Massenet was partly recorded live at their March 2012 Rosenblatt Recital at St Johns Smith Square, and partly in the studio in 2010.

Charles Jennens - the man behind Handel's Messiah

George Frideric Handel lived at what is now 25 Brook Street from 1723 until his death in 1759. The house has been through many vicissitudes since, but has been open as London's Handel House Museum since 2001. Handel's house is displayed in 18th century style, with the interiors reconstructed and restored, portraits and period furniture, whilst the one next door which was lived in by Jimi Hendrix, is used as an exhibition space. I went along yesterday to catch the exhibition, Charles Jennens: the man behind Handel's Messiah before it closed on 14 April 2013.

The museum is somewhat quirky in that the ground floor is still used as a shop, so that visitors enter at the back in the basement, and then make their way up to the first and second floors where the museums are. You start on the second floor, which was Handel's bedroom floor. The rear of the house has been reconstructed, so that the closets are now rather bigger, on the second floor the room is used as an audio/visual room and I caught a bit of the video about Handel with a painter talking about her series of paintings based on Messiah, plus Christopher Hogwood and Charles Mackerras talking about Handel the man. Then into Handel's dressing room, entered from the door at the back, i.e. entering from his closet!

Rediscover the English Oboe tonight

James Turnbull, whose disc The English Oboe: Rediscovered has been released on the Champs Hill label, has a concert tonight (5 April) to launch the CD. The concert is at the Princess Alexandra Hall, Royal Overseas League, St James's Street, London SW1 and James will be playing a lovely mix of music by Michael Berkeley, Thomas Atwood, John Casken, Rubbra, Edward Longstaff, Holst and RVW - I bet you didn't know that there was so much music for the instrument!. Further information from James Turnbull's website. If you can't manage the concert then do buy the CD, and James will be popping up at the Ryedale Festival in July.

AyseDeniz Gokcin

The young Turkish pianist AyseDeniz Gokcin, who made something of a stir with her arrangements of Pink Floyd songs a la Liszt (see my review), is having a busy time at the moment. She is giving a recital at St. James's Church, Piccadilly on Thursday April 25 with the Talent Unlimited Chamber Ensemble. She has also been celebrating the 30th anniversary of Michael Jackson performing Billie Jean by arranging the song and creating an accompanying video.

Tenebrae sings Will Todd - Choral at Cadogan

The chamber choir Tenebrae directed by Nigel Short made their appearance in the Choral at Cadogan series at the Cadogan Hall on 5 April 2013 accompanied by the English Chamber Orchestra in a programme which  celebrated the music of Will Todd. Todd's music was performed with a pair of works, selected by Todd, which reflected his influences: Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Elgar's part-song There is sweet music.

Music up close

MusicUpClose is a series of six events at Conway Hall intended to illuminate classical music and the way musicians think. The events are devised by the music ensemble sound collective in collaboration with pianist Simon Callaghan, Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Conway Hall. The series, on Wednesday evenings from 17 April 2013, is intended to be non-patronising and to exclude unnecessary technical terms and will be of interest those who love music but don't really know how it works. Participants will be able to ask questions during the rehearsals and performance, and as the events take place in an intimate space, they will be up close.  Its an interesting idea, and the group have come up with a rather attractive mix of themes for the evenings.

Making musical fireworks - The Opera Group at the Linbury Theatre

Mary Bevan as Lila
Picture credit Robert Workman

The Opera Group's latest production, The Firework-maker's Daughter by David Bruce and Glyn Maxwell is currently on tour and arrived at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre last night (3 April 2013). The performance was heavy with collaboration, the opera was a co-commission from The Opera Group and ROH2, it was co produced by The Opera Group and Opera North in association with ROH2 and Watford Palace Theatre. The instrumental ensemble was Chroma, and the director was John Fulljames, former artistic director of The Opera Group and now Assistant Director of Opera at the Royal Opera House. That's a lot of people to keep happy, you almost felt that there were more producers than performers (just five singers, two puppeteers and nine musicians, plus conductor), but then that's modern opera production for you. The weight of expectation would also lay heavy on the audience, as the opera is aimed at children and based on the book by beloved author Philip Pullman. Wednesday nights audience (a packed one) at the Linbury Theatre included plenty of children, and they provided an enthusiastic response so the event must be deemed a success. What of the opera?

The Ashby left behind

For those of you who attended vocal ensemble Stile Antico's lovely concert at the Wigmore Hall last week (see my review) and wondered about Kate Ashby, heavily pregnant, travelling with them on tour then the answer is, she isn't. There's a lovely posting on their blog about it. A founder member of the group, this will be the first time she's missed a gig. More on Stile Antico's blog.

A day with Bach - Bach Marathon with John Eliot Gardiner

Like much of Britain, we took advantage of the Easter weekend to get away and we spent a large chunk of Easter Monday travelling back from the East Midlands. This meant that we listened to substantial amounts of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Marathon on BBC Radio 3 on the car radio. It proved an uplifting and illuminating way to travel, experiencing Bach's music continuously and one again marvelling at his genius. John Eliot Gardiner proved a stimulating companion, both in his music making and in his introducing of the music. The main performers were his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with guest appearances from Alban Gerhardt, Viktoria Mullova and John Butt. The BBC dipped in and out of the events in the hall, so that it was actually rather difficult to ascertain quite what the Royal Albert Hall programme was.

Songs of the Sea, Songs of Travel - Anthony Michaels-Moore

Anthony Michaels-Moore and Michael Pollock's disc of songs by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams is from the first batch of discs from the new partnership between Rosenblatt Recitals and Opus Arte. Michaels-Moore for Rosenblatt Recitals at St John's Smith Square in 2007, and all the songs on this disc were recorded at St. John's in January 2008. The disc traverses English song from the 1870's through to 1925 via the songs of Stanford and his pupil RVW. Both Stanford's Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet and RVW's Songs of Travel can be underestimated, with the songs being richer than they might appear on the surface.

The recording catches Michaels-Moore's voice well, displaying a good firm baritone, with a strongly focused core and only a hint of extra vibrato on the longer notes. Histrionically he catches the mood of Stanford's songs just right. His open, direct delivery also revealing the subtler undercurrents in the songs. Stanford's Songs of the Sea were written in 1904 for the Leeds Festival, for baritone, chorus and orchestra. Michaels-Moore and Pollock use Stanford's version for voice and piano from the vocal score, which means that we lose out on Stanford's superb orchestration, but gain in subtlety of scale.

In case you missed it - March on Planet Hugill

March on Planet Hugill opened in modern day Seville with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. We then moved to Hackney for English Touring Opera's new production of Cosi fan tutte with Laura Mitchell and Kitty Whately. Still in Hackney, ETO also gave the UK's first professional stage performance of Donizetti's L'Assedio di Calais.

More rare opera, Lully's Phaeton made a welcome appearance at the Barbican Centre, and Handel'sImeneo, his penultimate opera, was performed at the London Handel Festival.

Sunken Garden teaser

English National Opera is giving the premiere of Michel van der Aa's new opera Sunken Garden at the Barbican Centre on 12 April 2013, with a run of just 7 performances. The work uses a libretto by the novelist David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) and the piece will be using technology to create 'a truly immersive experience', we are promised live performance combined with 3D film. The plot is something of a mystery story and promises to be rather dark. The cast includes Roderick Williams, Katherine Manley and Claron McFaddon and will be conducted by Andre de Ridder. ENO have released a couple of teaser videos and you can see one after the break.

Spring and Summer in Smith Square

The April to August programme at St Johns Smith Square sees the anniversaries of Britten and George Lloyd being commemorated, plus there are memorial concerts for soprano Elizabeth Connell and composer John Marlow Rhys. Tenor David Rendall makes a welcome return, along with a wide variety of other song recitals. There are also staged versions of Handel's Messiah and Britten's Curlew River, plus the varied delights of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music.

St John’s Passion: Bach at the Barbican

James Ghilchrist

Sat on the Barbican’s sofa-like chairs – can there be a pleasanter way to be reminded of the story of Easter than the Academy of Ancient Music’s rendition of St John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) on Good Friday (29 March 2013).

The AAM, under the directorship of Richard Egarr is as good an orchestra as any modern ensemble, and when in force, as for the Passion, there is no taint of the fuddy duddy image which can linger around ‘early music’ groups. This is no bunch of self congratulatory musicians, playing metronomically, but rather are a force to be reckoned with. Bach may not have written opera – but in the hands of the AAM this is a close as it gets.

Locus genii

Covent Garden Theatre in the 1820's

We all like to think of London as an intensely historical place, where in many places we walk in the footsteps of the past. But London has had a constant tendency to re-invent and rebuild itself so in musical terms there are not too many places where we can stand in the steps of history. Fires and two world wars, not to mention the Victorian and 20th century passion for regeneration, has left us with few really historic arts venues. Theatres have a tendency to burn down, and all of our concert halls are 20th century or later. Until relatively recently, London didn't even have a composer house museum though the Handel House Museum has thankfully remedied that. Instead we have to use our imagination, and look beneath the present city.

Bach and beyond - April to June highlight at Kings Place

Spring sees Bach continue to be unwrapped at Kings Place, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Sixteen and many more. But also, a week of concerts, films and talks celebrates Wagner's centenary. Along the way we have Tasmin Little exploring the history of the violin, and exploration of the influence of Roma (Gypsy) music on classical music, some rather tempting chamber music and, of course, varied talks, comedy and goodness knows what else.

Haunted intensity - Alice Coote in Schubert's Die Winterreise

Though there is a long and distinguished history of mezzo-soprano's singing Schubert's Die Winterreise, the pairing still isn't all that common and often results in something extra special. Alice Coote is an artist who combines beauty of tone with a remarkable nervous intensity, so her performance of Die Winterreise was always going to be striking. She sang the cycle, with Julius Drake at the piano, at the Wigmore Hall in January 2012 and this disc, on the Wigmore Live label, is based on live recordings of two performances.

Coote and Drake establish the tone from the outset, with Coote providing burnished vocal tones and a fine sense of line, combined with a feel for the shape of phrases and a stunning intensity of words. She is ably partnered by Drake and the two bring a feeling of pressing onward and feverish brightness to the opening song, Gute Nacht (Good Night). This continues into the next song as Die Wetterfahne (The weather-vane) is characterised by an almost manic intensity.

Echoes of an earlier age

Adelina Patti

Many years ago I heard Marilyn Horne, on the radio, talking about performing Rossini and incorporating into the performance cadenza's and ornamentation from Rossini's time and then being castigated by reviewers for her over the top, cavalier ornamentation. In many ways this is quite a salutary story and makes us realise the past really is another country and that they actually do things differently there. No more so than in opera singing.

We have had years of instrumentalists re-discovering period techniques, applying them to modern practice and re-discovering sounds, qualities and textures of the past. But we still don't do this with singers. I am not aware of anyone attempting to put, say, every single detail of Manuel Garcia's singing tutor into action. The results would be illuminating, far more so than we realise.

Mansfield Park returns

Jonathan Dove's opera Mansfield Park was commissioned by Heritage Opera in 2011 and has been toured to country houses with a brief run in London last year. Now it Hamstead Garden Opera are performing the work at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, the Gatehouse Pub in Highgate Village from 19 April to April 28. Directed by Bruno Ravella and designed by Holly Seager, with Oliver-John Ruthven as the musical director the piece is double cast. Librettist Alasdair Middleton has based the text on Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park. For maximum compactness, the work is scored for just piano-duet. 

Dove is one of that rare breed of composers able to write intelligent, well-written and well constructed operas which are still accessible. Alasdair Middleton has collaborated on quite a number of works with Dove, notably their operas Pinocchio and The Enchanted Pig. Dove's operas don't visit London as often as they deserve, so Hampstead Garden Opera's production Mansfield Park is a great treat. Further information from Hampstead Garden Opera's website.

Appealing and intriguing - A Single Noon

Gregg Kallor is a young American composer pianist whose work encompasses improvisation and straddles the divide between jazz and classical. His nine movement suite, A Single Noon was premiered in April 2011 at Carnegie Hall in New York, in a concert where Kallor also played music by Bartok, Chick Corea, Annie Clark (St Vincent), Henry Mancini, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Louise Talma, indicating Kallor's range and diverse interests. On this disc he has now recorded A Single Noon for the first time.

A Single Noon is a nine-movement suite which is a paen to life in New York City in all its diversity. The title comes from Emily Dickinson, 'It bloomed and droppt, a Single Noon', i.e. seize the day. Kallor starts with the suite's title movement, which introduces the theme which will wend its way through all the other movements.

Best and Outstanding - Olivier Awards

This year's Olivier Awards nominees have been revealed. I'm not quite sure what period they cover as one of the nominated opera productions is the recent ENO La Traviata, but the lists make interesting reading. Those nominated are inevitable only a fraction of what we've seen in the last year, but I can't help feeling that there are bits missing and that nominations do not reflect the diversity of new opera productions in London at the moment.

Young Stars - Children Helping Children

The 10th anniversary Children Helping Children concert takes place at Cadogan Hall on 27 April 2013. The concert supports the charity Hemihelp, the national charity for children and young people with hemiplegia. The concert presents young musicians aged between 7 and 17 years old, playing in support of the charity. At the first Children Helping Children concert ten years ago, violinist Nicola Benedetti made an appearance before going on to win the BBC Young Musician of the Year. This year the concert features a 13 year old pianist and composer who will perform a movement from his own concerto, a 17 year old clarinet player and the Junior Brass Band from the Centre for Young Musicians. Sean Rafferty, from BBC Radio 3, will act as special guest presenter, Siobhan McMahon MSP will be the guest speaker and the concert will be performed in the presence of HRH Princess Alexandra. Further information and tickets from the Cadogan Hall website.

Another Trio of Passions

Further Good Friday performances of Bach's passions have caught my eye. In Dublin, at the National Concert Hall there is a performance of Bach's St John Passion with Mark Wilde, Nicholas Merryweather, Sarah Power, Sharon Carty, Eamonn Mulhall and Gavan Ring with the RTE Philharmonic Choir and RTW National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Rosewell; they are also presenting Haydn's Seven Last Words. In Bristol, David Hill conducts the BBC Singers and St. James Baroque in Bach's St Mark Passion, at St. George's Brandon Hill in Bristol. This is a reconstruction of the now lost passion; the libretto and a torso of the music survives. Finally in Dorchester Abbey, the Orchestra of St Johns are performing Bach's St John Passion with OSJ Voices, Stuart Jackson, Ed Ballard, Ilona Domnich, Roderick Morris Christopher Turner and Johnny Herford, conducted by John Lubbock.

Tenebrae - Chapelle du Roi at St John's Smith Square

Alistair Dixon and Chapelle du Roi's Tenebrae concert has become something of a welcome fixture in the calendar at St Johns Smith Square. Wednesday's concert (27 March) saw the group performing Lamentations by Palestrina, Victoria and Lobo, plus Responds by Victoria, a trio of motets by Byrd and Tallis, plus the first performance for 300 years of a Credo setting by Lobo. Dixon had structured the work like a Tenebrae service, complete with candles that were gradually extinguished and the hall lights dimmed so that the final Victoria Ave Regina Coelorum was sung in half-darkness. Romantically evocative, but also liturgically correct, which helps explain why the Tenebrae service was so popular.

Sombrely moving - Stile Antico at the Wigmore Hall

Stile Antico is a vocal ensemble making a name for itself performing a wide variety of Early Music without a conductor. For their concert at the Wigmore Hall on Tuesday 26 Marc 2013 they performed a seasonal programme, Miserere: penitential Music by Byrd and his Contemporaries, with music not only by William Byrd, but by Thomas Tallis, Thomas Morley, John Sheppard and Robert White. Fielding some twelve singers (with all women on the alto line), the group in fact almost moves from vocal ensemble to chamber choir.

They performed in a semi-circle, alternating men and women, ensuring that all members had good eye contact. The sense of informed communication and lively interchange (both vocal and non-vocal) was a strong feature of the evening. As befitted the season, the music was all sombre and penitential with Robert White's Lamentations concluding part one, and William Byrd's Infelix ergo concluding part two.

Bach marathon on Easter Monday

If you are in London on Easter Monday then head over to the Albert Hall for the Bach Marathon led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner (or stay at home and listen to it on the radio as BBC Radio 3 are broadcasting the whole event). There are nine hours of Bach's music, which might seem a lot but frankly barely makes a dent in his total output. The event runs from 1pm to 10pm and will include Bach's Singet dem Herrn, the Easter cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden (with the audience joining in the chorale) and the Mass in B Minor with Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque soloists. Other performers will include Viktoria Mullova, Joanne MacGregor, Alban Gerhardt and John Butt. There will be a discussion panel including Robert Levin. To co-incide with the performance and to mark Eliot Gardiner's 70th birthday on 20 April, his label SDG will be releasing his recordings of Bach's four Ascension Day cantatas completing the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage series. Further information from the Bach Marathon website.

A moment of breath - premiere of Anahata by Eloise Nancie Gynn

Eloise Nancie Glynn

Commissioned by the Panufnik Young Composers Scheme, conducted by Nicholas Collon, and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, Anahata by Eloise Nancie Gynn was a moment of breath on a cold and frantic spring evening (24 March 2013). Anahata was premiered at the start of a concert which continued with Manfred Honeck conducting Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Brahms's Violin Concerto with Nikolaj Znaider. 

It may have been close to freezing outside but sat on one of Barbican’s sofa-like seats Anahata was the perfect meditational moment to bring everything back into focus. Nancie studied composition at Cardiff University and her interests in experimental percussion and extended wind techniques, along with her love of world music and nature have come together in a beautifully meditational work.

A trio of Passions

If you are in London on Good Friday (29 March 2013), then there is the chance to hear one of a trio of Bach passion performances with some very strong performers. At St. Johns Smith Square, Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment perform Bach's St John Passion with Ian Bostridge, Neal Davies, Julia Doyle, Iestyn Davies, Nicholas Mulroy and Robert Davies. There is another St. John Passion at the Barbican Centre with Richard Egarr directing the Academy of Ancient Music and the choir of the Academy of Ancient Music with James Gilchrist, Matthew Rose, Elizabeth Watts, Sarah Connolly, Andrew Kennedy, and Christopher Purves. 

Over at St. George's Church, Hanover Square, Lawrence Cummings conducts the choir of St. George's Hanover Square and the London Handel Orchestra in the annual performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. This is performed in the context of Lutheran Vespers, as Bach would have known it, with a sermon coming between parts one and two. The soloists this year are Nathan Vale, George Humphreys, Stefanie True, Tim Mead and Lukas Jakobski.

Buzzing with new music - Cheltenham Music Festival 2013

This year's Cheltenham Music Festival runs from 3 to 14 July and as ever it is a-buzz with new music. One of the oldest music festivals in the UK (it was established in 1945), current director Meurig Bowen has been in place since 2007; he talks about the festival's 'robust commitment to a wide range of new music'. This is particularly challenging in the current economic times, but the programme includes 15 premieres including new pieces by David Sawer, Roxanna Panufnik, Colin Matthews, David Matthews, Michael Zev Gordon, Antony Pitts and Gabriel Jackson. The festival is also launching a new Composer Academy, as well as marking the anniversaries of Britten and Poulenc. The festival uses a wonderful range of locations, many of them very historic, and it is lovely to see the way different artists thread their way through the programme in a variety of guises.

Endellion String Quartet in Cambridge, London and New York

The Endellion Quartet are having a busy year. This season is the quartet's 34th year, and their 20th year in Residence at Cambridge University. They will also be playing the complete Beethoven Quartets twice, in the space of 10 days, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent performances have included the premiere of Thea Musgrave's Towards the Blue commissioned by the Wigmore Hall for clarinettist Michael Collins and London Winds to perform with the quartet. 

Their Cambridge season ends on May 8 with a concert at West Road Concert Hall performing Bartok's String Quartet No. 1 and Haydn, plus the Brahms Piano Quartet for which Andrew Watkinson, Garfield Jackson and David Waterman will be joined by the extraordinarily gifted Hok Kiu Johnson Leung (He started giving public concerts internationally at the age of eight. He is in his first year studying engineering at Downing College. He also holds an instrumental award scholarship). The quartet returns to the Wigmore Hall on 24 April, with a concert of Haydn, Britten (String Quartet No. 2) and Beethoven (String Quartet in F, Op. 18, No. 1 'Romeo and Juliet'). Further information from the Endellion String Quartet website.

Couperin - Trois Lecons de Tenebres - Kings Consort

For their second CD on their new Vivat label, Robert King and the King's Consort have moved to the opposite extreme to their first disc of large-scale 19th century sacred music with orchestra accompaniment. On this disc there are just two singers (soprano Carolyn Sampson and mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland) and three instrumentalists (Susanne Heinrich bass viol, Lynda Sayce theorbo and Robert King chamber organ) performing early 18th century French sacred music. Francois Couperin's Trois Lecons de Tenebres programmed in a highly satisfying and intelligent sequence with instrumental works by Marin Maria and Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, plus Couperin's Motet pour le jour de Paques and Magnificat.

A truly absorbing evening - Rough for Opera

Last night (25 March) we attended Second Movement's Rough for Opera, their scratch night for new opera at the Cockpit Theatre. At these events, new opera is present as work in progress with fragments of new works and complete works in progress. After the performance there is then a chance to participate in a discussion about the new piece; a frankly scary moment for the poor composer who might have heard their work performed in public for the first time, but a usefully illuminating one. For those not interested in sounding off in public, there are feed back forms too. We heard the first scene from Mike Christie's The Miller's Wife and Scars by Kate Whitley, with Q&A's led by Professor Paul Barker from the Central School of Speech and Drama.

New sounds for 10th birthday celebrations

LSO St. Luke's is currently having a 10th birthday festival (is it really 10 years?). On Monday 25 March, composers from the LSO's new composer initiative, LSO SoundHub join with with LSO Discovery’s Digital Technology Group for a concert entitled Present. Curate. Collaborate. Innovate for what promises to be a wide range of styles, including ambient soundscapes, fully fledged hip-hop tracks and classical compositions. LSO St. Luke's birthday events run until 1 April and include performances from the LSO Community Choir, the LSO Strings, the Nash Ensemble and Tunisian vocalist Dhafer Youssef brings some Middle Eastern music to the mix. On Saturday 30 March (Easter Saturday), there is the Not(e) Perfect Orchestra for adults who haven't played an instrument for ages, or who have never played. And on Easter Monday there is a family open day. See the website for further details.

Maurice Greene's Amoretti

Maurice Greene (1696 - 1755) is one of that generation of English composers who grew up in Handel's shadow. Handel, a composer who seems to have been the least collegiate of men, was hardly the man to encourage younger composers and in fact Greene is perhaps best known for the fact that Handel disliked him. 

On this disc harpsichordist Luke Green and tenor Benjamin Hulett along with theorbo player Giangiacomo Pinardi have recorded Maurice Greene's settings of 25 of Spenser's Amoretti, effectively one of the earliest English song cycles, producing a disc of great charm.

Open source - onward and upward

In January 2013, I attended a recital by the pianist, Kimiko Ishizaka, when she played the complete Well Tempered Clavier, volume 1 (see my review). Ishizaka is a great believer in Open Source and with her Open Goldberg project has made her recording and a score of Bach's Goldberg Variations available for free download. This daring is cleary bearing fruit in striking ways; Ishizaka's recording will be used as illustrations a lecture about Bach and Fractals this Saturday (March 23) at the BachHaus as part of the annual BachFest in Cochabamba, Bolivia. (If you happen to be in Bolivia, the event starts at 18:00 with a video by Arthur C. Clarke about Fractals.) You can find the BachFest programme in English at the festival website.

La Voix Humaine - Felicity Lott and Graham Johnson DVD

Felicity Lott and Graham Johnson's new DVD of Poulenc's La Voix Humaine was given its first public outing last night (22 March 2013) at the Institut Francais in London as part of their It's All About Piano festival which runs until Sunday 24 March. The showing of the DVD was followed by a discussion between James Jolly and the performers. The DVD is released on the Champs Hill Records label. Though Poulenc himself performed the work accompanying Denise Duval on the piano, he forbade further performances of the piano version and it is in orchestral guise that Poulenc's setting of Jean Cocteau's play is best known. For this DVD, the performers received special permission from the Poulenc estate to perform the French version.

Sound Reflections

Looking Beneath The Surface,
by Susan Haire

Indra's Net is a new show at the Cello Factory featuring large installations by artist Susan Haire. The works are innovatively designed from different reflective materials and the pieces focus on reflection and contemplation. More than that, the exhibition is a collaboration between Haire and the composer Stephen Dydo. The title of the exhibition is a reference to a Buddhist metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things. The exhibition runs at the Cello Factory in Waterloo from 16 to 23 April.  (and is open between 20 and 24 March for visitors to the London Ear Festival). But there is still more than that, as there are a series of events, many of a musical nature, being held during the exhibition so that you can see poets and musicians performing alongside the art works.

Outdoor Berlioz with LSO and young musicians

The London Symphony Orchestra will be back in Trafalgar Square on Bank Holiday Monday 27 May, featuring an all Berlioz programme which features young players from their music education and community programme. Valery Gergiev will be on hand to conduct Berlioz's Le Corsaire and Symphonie Fantastique. But there will also be version of the Symphonie fantastique a specially arranged by Gareth Glyn in which 80 young musicians, including conservatoire students and LSO On Track young musicians from LSO Discovery, the Orchestra’s music education and community programme, will play alongside the LSO players. Further information from the LSO Open Air Classics website.

London Song Festival develops

Nigel Foster's London Song Festival has some interesting new developments this year. First off, there is a smart new festival website. Then the festival itself has expanded and in addition to the autumn concert series, there are four events in a new spring/summer segment of the festival; these events provide the opportunity to hear the complete songs of Verdi and of Wagner. Finally, Foster has published Three Songs for Madame Vasnier, a group of hitherto unpublished Debussy songs.

Winning young talent - Sky Arts Futures Fund

The Sky Arts Futures Fund aims to create life-changing opportunities for your artists; one of the first winners was Daisy Evans, whose Silent Opera project debuted earlier this year (read our review). Amongst the winners this year are composer Mark Simpson and creative producer Kate Whitley. Each winner receives a bursary of £30,000 plus mentoring from senior staff at Sky and leaders in their industry, to help develop their creative practice and take their work to the next level. Simpson will be using the bursary to compose a new piece based on John Gray's book The Immortalisation Commission. The piece will be for solo violin, 45 instruments and voices, and will last 30 minutes. Whitley won with her classical music club night project TROSP, which takes concerts out of traditional halls and into disused car parks, nightclubs and industrial warehouses across the UK. She will be using the bursary to concentrate on the project, which returns to a car-park in Peckham this summer. Other winners are writer and poet Sabrina Mahfouz, choreographer Aakash Odedra and digital artist Lu Sisi. Further information from the Ideas Tap website.

The Rival Queens return

Faustina Bordoni

Francesca Cuzzoni

Classical Opera Company's delightful Handel and the Rival Queens returns on March 26 at St. George's Bristol, with sopranos Eleanor Dennis and Mhairi Lawson, plus the actor Christopher Benjamin with Christian Curnyn conducting the Early Opera Company. The programme explores Handel's relationships with the two sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni at a time when he was writing operas like Rodelinda, Cleopatra and Alessandro, with fireworks both on and off the stage. The programme combines arias and duets, with lively readings from contemporary diaries, newspapers and other sources. I saw their performance at last year's Lufthansa Festival in London and can highly recommend it (see my review). If you can't make it to Bristol, then fear not, the programme is live of BBC Radio 3 as part of their Baroque Spring. Further information from the Early Opera Company website.