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.