Announcing the 2020 Hastings International Piano Festival

26^TH FEBRUARY – 8^TH MARCH 2020

WHITE ROCK THEATRE AND ST MARY IN THE CASTLE

The Inaugural Hastings International Piano Festival will host an exciting array of music concerts, featuring some of the most celebrated artists including headliner Rufus Wainwright, one of the world’s most revered singer-songwriters, composers and performers of his generation. Rufus will be joined by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on Friday 28^th February at The White Rock Theatre on Hastings iconic sea front, for a spectacular evening of songs from his eclectic discography.

The festival opens on Wednesday 26^th February with a concert by one of the UK’s most successful songwriters of all time – Guy Chambers, whose 50 year career has seen Guy write and produce for some of the world’s most popular artists including Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Diana Ross, Tom Jones, Tina Turner, Mark Ronson and Rufus Wainwright to name but a few. Performing songs at the piano including tracks taken from his new album Go Gently Into the Light.

The festival continues on Thursday 27^th February with Reuben James, one of the UK’s most exciting young singer-songwriters and performers best known for his on-going collaborations with Sam Smith. Reuben co-wrote the title track from Sam Smith’s most recent album The Thrill Of It All, as well as the song Him and the festival is delighted he is bringing his 10 piece band which explores the boundaries between jazz and pop.

The festival welcomes Claire Martin OBE, the Queen of British Jazz to Hastings on Thursday 5^th March at St Mary in The Castle with a stellar line-up of Claire’s music friends including some of the jazz world’s great artists including Liane Carroll, Alex Garnett and The Swedish Trio.

Oscar winning composer and songwriter Rachel Portman OBE will perform and be interviewed about her extensive career during this unique production on Friday 6^th March at St Mary in the Castle, specially produced for Hastings International Piano Festival. Rachel has written over 100 scores for film, television and film and is the first woman to win an Academy Award for film music for the film Emma and went on to be nominated twice more for Cider House Rules and Chocolat, which also earned her a Golden Globe nomination. Rachel’s performance will include special collaborations with local pianists giving them a once in a lifetime opportunity to perform with a globally renowned artist.

Hastings International Piano Festival Classical Gala Concert with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra takes place at The White Rock Theatre on Saturday 29^th March with a spectacular programme of piano concertos performed by an array of artists including the illustrious pianist and BBC Young Musician of The Year Martin James Bartlett. Martin will be joined by the winner of the 2019 Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition Fumiya Koido and Prizewinner Sylvia Jiang.

Two of our most respected British actors Patricia Hodge and Alex Jennings join pianist Lucy Parham on Sunday 1^st March at The White Rock Theatre for ‘The Romantic Life of Chopin’ – an evening of words and music scripted and adapted from letters and diaries chronicling the romantic life of one of the greatest and most popular composers for solo piano.

Silent Movie Night Beggars of Life with live accompaniment from The Dodge Brothers featuring Mark Kermode and Neil Brand takes place at St Mary in the Castle on Wednesday 4^th March. Revered Film critic Kermode joins his band mates and acclaimed composer Brand for this film extravaganza.

Closing the 2020 festival The Puppini Sisters, the Queens of Close Harmony Swing and The Pasadena Roof Orchestra take to the stage at St Mary In The Castle on Saturday 7th March to delight the festival audience with their trailblazing re-workings of pop and classical songs that will have the audience dancing in the aisles.

Tickets for both The White Rock Theatre and St Mary in The Castle go on sale on Wednesday 20^th November and are available from The White Rock Theatre Box office or visit HERE

The Brighton Phil’s 2019/20 exciting season opener at Brighton Dome on Sunday 10^th November showcases the violin in its many guises and blurs the boundaries of classical, tango, jazz and gypsy folk music. We are delighted to welcome violinist Christian Garrick and friends (from his Budapest Café Orchestra and the Christian Garrick Quartet) for what promises to be a memorable collaboration with the Brighton Philharmonic Strings.

Christian Garrick is no stranger to Brighton audiences as he performed Astor Piazzolla’s brilliant and evocative re-working of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at Brighton Dome with the Brighton Phil under Barry Wordsworth in 2006. He is very excited to be performing it again, alongside Piazzolla’s sultry Libertango, one of the composer’s most performed works with a fiendishly familiar melody full of the spicy rhythms of his native Argentina.

Christian is an improvising violinist, composer and bandleader, who is professor of jazz and non-classical violin at three of London’s major music conservatoires, and has made a huge name for himself as a self-styled “Violin Operator”. He is joined on stage by David Gordon on the piano and melodica, Richard Pryce on double bass, Tom Hooper on drums and percussion, Eddie Hession on button accordion, and Adrian Zolotuhin on guitar, saz and domra.

The great jazz saxophonist and composer Sir John Dankworth wrote his bluesy jazz Violin Concerto for Christian in 2005, a rhythmic and expansive piece that bounds along in the spirit of Gershwin’s great jazz orchestral works, centred on the solo violin and a classic piano-bass-drums jazz trio. Christian writes:

“John Dankworth was a guiding figure from an early point in my life. Dad was pianist with Cleo Laine and John for a while in the 1970’s and I went on many of their Wavendon music courses over the years, during which time, John introduced me (aged 10) to a young Nigel Kennedy (25) which ensued in an unforgettable all-out fiddle jazz duel!  Latterly I’ve performed and recorded numerously with the Dankworths so I was honoured that John wrote his concerto with me in mind right after he’d finished one for clarinet for Emma Johnson.”

Another treat will be an orchestral suite of Anne Dudley’s Poldark score. Christian has been playing the solo violin parts for the BBC’s Poldark since the series began in 2015. Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley scored the beautiful theme tune for Christian to play while the opening and closing credits roll.

The concert will also feature original pieces composed by Christian and a helping of folk-gypsy hijinks from members of the Budapest Café Orchestra, some of whom will be joining us fresh from their 10^th anniversary tour.

Tickets from £14.50-£42.50 (50% discount for students/Under 18s) are available from Brighton Dome Ticket Office in Church Street, (01273) 709709 and online: www.brightondome.org

Discounted parking for Brighton Phil concert attendees can be found in NCP Church Street Car Park, a couple of minutes’ walk from the Dome, costing just £6 between 1pm & 6pm.

The Brighton Phil’s next concert, on Sunday 1^st December, presents a cornucopia of classics, conducted by Natalie Murray-Beale and featuring Thomas Gould (violin) performing Vaughan Williams’ evocative The Lark Ascending.

This year the internationally famous vocal ensemble, I Fagiolini, will be performing their new immersive concert ‘Leonardo Shaping the Invisible’ – celebrating the artist on the 500th anniversary of his death – at St Mary in the Castle on Friday 18^th October. This critically acclaimed programme, introduced by Leonardo expert Professor Martin Kemp, will match projections of Da Vinci’s iconic art with vocal masterworks.

TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW

The Festival opens with a Concert by Candlelight also at St Mary’s on Thursday 17^th October, performed by Hastings Early Music Festival Baroque, the Festival Ensemble, comprising of international period instrument specialists.

For the other events, BBC New Generation Artists the Consone Quartet perform at the Kino Teatr at the Sunday afternoon chamber music platform, and pianist Jan Rautio performs Bach In Focus at the Friday morning coffee concert.  Each concert has a parallel supporting event, including open rehearsals and a chance to speak to performers.

Full details can be found at www.hemf.co.uk and tickets are now available.

‘Unsung Heroine’ – The Telling

St Paul’s Worthing

Sunday 13 October

5.45pm doors/cafe , start at 6.15pm

If you missed this early music concert-drama from writer/singer Clare Norburn at the Hastings Literary Festival in the late summer – maybe your nose was deep in a recommended book! – all is not lost and gone if Worthing is on your travel radar.

This Arts Council-backed Medieval bio-fantasy has a handy start time if your journey’s a bit lengthy. It will end around 8pm and contain a short Q&A.

To find a female troubadour writing and singing songs as far as you can back in history, the first lone work of lyric and music on surviving manuscript is ‘A Chantar’, by Provençal countess, Beatriz de Dia. The song is apparently from a true heart and is reaction to betrayal, longing and a pain requiring suppression amid aristocratic court life of love, intrigue and back-stabbing.

Norburn seizes on this as another historical figure ripe for her instinctive treatment in blending fact with fiction, blurring concert into theatre, and creating another entertaining, informative and immersive experience for The Telling’s fascinated and growing audience.

‘Unsung Heroine’s’ distinctive soundtrack of Medieval harp, fiddle and bagpipes with percussion, in the hands of instrumental specialists Joy Smith and Giles Lewin, explores and juxtaposes plaintive ballads with the rumbustious dances of court life and codpiece fun beyond its walls.

The villain of the piece, in times when unhappy spouses conventionally allowed each other their dalliances, is (“Did you guess, Mr Cadfael?”) a fellow troubadour.

Norburn’s dramatic imagination places actress Anna Demetrious in the role of Beatriz de Dia while Norburn herself sings as not only various key characters but of both a confidante to the countess and a voice inside her head. Shades of the fine psychological plays by David Pountney dramatised on BBC Radio 3.

Production is by Norburn, direction by TV series and movies man Nicholas Renton, and lighting design is by Natalie Rowland.

Ticket details and further concert information – plus a trail video from its performance at Music in Oxford: https://www.facebook.com/events/386913162009827/

“Gorgeous music . . . and the story’s human, truthful and a bit funny . . .” – Read here the interview with actress Anna Demetriou who is Beatriz de Dia: https://www.thetelling.co.uk/post/interview-anna-demitriou-on-playing-beatriz

The London Mozart Players, the UK’s longest–established chamber orchestra, has announced a year–long residency at the Opus Theatre in Hastings, East Sussex. As ‘Artists in Residence’, the LMP will deliver an exciting programme of classical music concerts and outreach work to this seaside community throughout the 2019/20 season. 

Building on the orchestra’s pioneering work in Upper Norwood, London SE19, where it is firmly embedded in the local community, the LMP looks forward to building a similar relationship with the people of Hastings, developing new audiences for classical music, inspiring young people and delivering a series of world class concerts with high profile artistes. The season will include school concerts, side-by-side performances with the young musicians of Hastings, musical visits to nursery schools, children’s events in libraries and concerts at the Opus Theatre, culminating in a community performance of the long-awaited multi-faith oratorio written by Opus Theatre’s director and composer, Polo Piatti. 

The launch concert at the Opus Theatre on Saturday 30th November is a showcase for young talent as dazzling pianist and BBC Young Musician winner (2018) Lauren Zhang and gifted local flautist Daisy Noton join the LMP to demonstrate their virtuosic abilities in two challenging Mozart works – Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 and his Flute Concerto No.1. The concert opens with Greig’s Holberg Suite, and closes with Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 ‘Trauer’. 

The first concert in this exciting residency marks a celebratory moment in the orchestra’s 70th birthday year which has seen concerts held at the Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, a birthday concert half way up the iconic Shard at the Shangri-La Hotel At The Shard and the gala re-opening concert at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls where the LMP has been resident for 30 years. 

Julia Desbruslais, Executive Director of the London Mozart Players commented: ‘We love taking classical music around the UK, and our ‘LMP by the Sea’ residency will give us the opportunity to inspire young musicians through our outreach work in around Hastings, and perform to music lovers of all generations at the Opus Theatre. This is an exciting venture for the orchestra and we are very much looking forward to sharing our passion for music with our new friends on the south coast.’ 

Polo Piatti, Composer/Director at the Opus Theatre said: ‘We are extremely proud to welcome the acclaimed London Mozart Players as the new Artists in Residence at the Opus Theatre in Hastings. The LMP’s residency is a dream come true, promising to become not only a great performance partnership for this iconic venue, but also a wonderful opportunity for local artistes and young musicians to perform alongside these world-class musicians.’ 

Supported by the Arts Council Great Britain, the Magdalen and Lasher Educational Foundation, Foyle Foundation, the Isabel Blackman Foundation and the Hastings Arts and Culture Scheme. 

It is quite unusual for a living composer based in the UK to have one of his major works world-premiered in the USA. But this is the plan for Hastings-based composer Polo Piatti’s ‘Bohemian Concerto’ for piano and orchestra. The concerto will be performed at the prestigious Sandler Centre for the Performing Arts in Virginia Beach in October 2019. Piatti’s work was first discovered by international renowned concert pianist Thomas Pandolfi, who then set things in motion to perform it with the spectacular Symphonicity Orchestra, conducted by maestro Daniel W. Boothe. Piatti’s ‘Bohemian Concerto’ is a very romantic work that requires not only virtuosity of the pianist, but also a great deal of sensitivity in order to extract all the subtleties, emotions, vigour and passion encapsulated in the work.

Regarding the intriguing title of the work, Polo Piatti explains: “This concerto is all about the Bohemian life of an artist, a life full of ups and downs, of ecstatic highs and devastating lows, of constant hopes and broken dreams, near misses and silver linings. The work goes from happiness to pain and from desperation to success, describing an artistic life lived to the full and without safety nets.”

Piatti has written, produced and arranged music extensively, mostly for the concert hall, theatre and film. Born in Argentina, he embarked on an international career as a concert pianist at an early age. He completed further studies in Paris and Berlin, moving later to work and perform in London. He has lived in Hastings for over twelve years where he founded and is the Artistic Director of the prestigious ‘International Composers Festival’ and the ‘Hastings Sinfonia Orchestra’. In 2017 he opened the Opus Theatre, a 700 seater concert hall in Hastings, with the intention of offering world class performances that are accessible to everyone. Further world-premieres in 2020 include his multi-faith oratorio ‘Libera Nos’ with the renowned London Mozart Players in conjunction with the Hastings Sinfonia Orchestra and his ‘Christmas Concerto’ for guitar and orchestra. Most recently he has been commissioned to write a concerto for violoncello and orchestra. Piatti is a member of the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain.