Monthly Archives: May 2017

St Nicolas Church, Pevensey

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Lunch time Organ Recital Friday 9 June at 1.00pm

John Collins, an authority on early European organ music and organist at Christ Church, Worthing, will give a lunch-time recital at St. Nicolas Church, Pevensey on Friday 9 June at 1 PM. Admission is free of charge, but a retiring collection will be taken for the St Nicolas Restoration Fund.

The programme will comprise pieces from across Europe from the 16th to 18th century including toccatas, variations, sonatas, fugues and voluntaries, as well as one work by a living composer. The concert, which will last about one hour, will conclude with the Hornpipe from Handel’s Water Music.

“We are delighted to be able to welcome back John Collins, and are most grateful to him for offering to play once more for the benefit of the Restoration Fund” said Churchwarden Simon Sargent. The Fund is within some £22,000 of the £255,000 target. Restoration work, which began in March, will resume in September.

Those attending the recital are welcome to bring a sandwich lunch with them. Drinks will be available.

Contact Simon Sargent at simonsargent@btinternet.com for further information.

 

 

Don Giovanni at St Mary in the Castle

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Hastings on Saturday and Sunday 3/4 June 2017

Marcio da Silva says:  Come and watch an international cast of young singers perform one of Mozart’s masterpieces this Saturday and Sunday at St. Mary in the Castle. Don Giovanni represents a mixture of several human feelings including love, lust, hate, anger, vengeance, pain, sadness and jealousy. All are taken to the extreme and are treated simultaneously with drama and comedy. That is what makes staging it such a challenge.

Finding truth in these characters takes time and here our young performers had 9 days to pull it off. This production, directed by Marcio da Silva, is both dark and funny. With modern costumes singers feel much more “naked” and vulnerable on stage and are therefore forced to reach in for true emotions in order to capture the audience’s attention.

You will see St Mary in the Castle transformed like you have never seen before. Don’t miss out on what could be an unforgettable evening. The opera will be sung in Italian with English surtitles. The chorus will be sung by members of the Hastings Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the evening will be accompanied by members of the Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra and Petra Hajduchova on the harpsichord. The Saturday performance will be conducted by Neylson Crepalde and the Sunday performance by Marcio da Silva.”

The notorious Don Giovanni is the archetypal amoral womaniser of all time and his nefarious love interests lead to drama and comedy aplenty exposing, as it does, both the human foibles and virtues to be found in the well-rounded characters. Don Giovanni lives life to the full in a never-ending pursuit of hedonism, regardless of the cost in broken hearts and destroyed lives along the way, but his victims of past relationships catch up with him as he meets his nemesis. The finale with an unrepentant Don Giovanni has stirred philosophical and artistic conjecture among many later writers including George Bernard Shaw, whose ‘Man and Superman’ includes a dramatic interlude where three of the Mozart characters: Don Giovanni, the statue of the Commendatore and Donna Anna are joined by the Devil in conversation on the nature of morality.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni 3 June – 7pm, and 4 June – 5pm – St Mary in the Castle Pelham Cres Hastings TN34 3AF Marcio Da Silva – Stage/Music Director, Monika Saunders -Set/Costumes, Neylson Crepalde – Assistant  Conductor, Laura Hensley – Assistant Stage Director
Tickets: £20 (Boxes), £17.50 (Stalls), £15.50 (Gallery) obtainable at 
Hastings Tourist information centre. 

Brighton Festival

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The Dome, Brighton, Sunday 28 May 2017

Clearly somebody decided to end this year’s Brighton Festival with a bang. The works chosen, by Copland and Adams, must be some of the loudest classical music available and were almost too loud within the relative limits of The Dome.

Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is very familiar but rarer live so that its raw edge and bombast strike somewhat uncomfortably, particularly when the brass is not fully coordinated at the start. The composer’s Lincoln Portrait followed. An equally crowd pleasing work, the orchestral sections from the Britten Sinfonia were well handled by conductor Diego Masson, but the text from Maryann Plunkett, despite being amplified, was often inaudible.

Thankfully the second half fared much better. John Adams Harmonium may be an early excursion into minimalism but it is highly effective. The opening setting of John Donne’s Negative Love is unexpectedly extrovert for so complex a text but full of shifting harmonies which were negotiated with aplomb by Brighton Festival Chorus. The following poems by Emily Dickinson seem more in keeping with Adam’s approach and Wild Nights is particularly successful. The intense sense of sexual tension building, like the storm, to a massive explosion is brilliantly captured and, on this occasion, as well executed. The rapid heart-beats continue in the double basses until the last seconds die away. A fine end, eventually,  to the festival.

THE FORESTS OF AULANKO

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From the creators of SEA FEVER comes:
THE FORESTS OF AULANKO

A classical concert with a twist, featuring
SIBELIUS SYMPHONY NO. 5

The Birley Centre, Eastbourne   |   7.30pm   |   June 28th 2017
Tickets £12, including a surprise cocktail

“Moving in the extreme”
– The Independent

“Made you feel like you were at the centre of an arctic gale with frost on your chin!” 
– The Guardian

The Forests of Aulanko is a concert. Just not as you know it.

In the PRE-CONCERT SHOW journey to the forests of Aulanko, home of Jean Sibelius, with music written specially for the adventure by 2012 BBC Young Composer of the Year, Alex Woolf. In the LIVE PROGRAMME NOTE, fly over the Finnish landscapes that inspired Sibelius, with tales about the composer and his world.

After a COCKTAIL inspired by the music, it’s the MAIN EVENT: a performance of Sibelius’s most iconic work, his 5th Symphony. It tells of the triumph of life over death, captures the perfection of the natural world, and contains one of the greatest melodies ever written – an arc of swans flying home to nest, captured in sound.

The Arensky Chamber Orchestra is Britain’s orchestra of revolutionaries. Extraordinary classical musicians dedicated to electrifying performance and mind-opening presentation.

Funded by the Arts Council and led by Eastbourne native William Kunhardt, the ACO are dedicated to building a second, permanent home on the South Coast. Imagine a year-round programme of daring, genre-bending, orchestral music in your town. If that sounds good, make sure you join us. The revolution needs your help.

Book online at www.wegottickets.com/eastbournecollege
Call: 01323 452255 | email: boxoffice@eastbourne-college.co.uk

DISCOVER MORE AT BLOG.THEACO.CO.UK

Brighton Festival: Les Talens Lyriques

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Dome, Brighton, 21 May 2017

With the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi’s birth it was understandable that there would be celebrations this summer, but Brighton has excelled itself. After I Fagiolinni’s magnificent Vespers at Glyndebourne come Les Talens Lyriques with secular works. Surprisingly, after the opulence of the liturgical settings, these vocal pieces – settings of  classical age stories – are far more sparse in their orchestration and harmony, with an intense attention to the text and emotional detail.

They opened with Ballo delle ingrate, a court scene which would originally have involved members of the audience in costume. Here we had to concentrate simply on the score, but what a wonderful piece of understatement it is. Valeria Girardello’s moving Venere pleads with Nathanael Tavernier’s hard-edged Pluto to allow the shades of arrogant women, doomed to eternity in the gloom of Hades, to be allowed out to warn their living relatives. It is a none-too subtle piece of social engineering but so masterfully sung it almost convinces us.

Magdalena Pluta’s Arianna is far more open in her emotional turmoil and genuinely moving. The constant gentle return to O Teseo makes us realise that she will never let go of her love for him. Given the simplicity of the orchestration this is a miracle of detail.

After the interval we heard Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Though more familiar, the setting still surprises with the intensity of its emotional changes and the ferocity of the writing. The narrative was succinctly handled by Nicolas Maraziotis’ powerful and precise diction. The final baptismal scene alone allows for gentler tones from the organ and strings.

There was a time when the Brighton Festival would have brought us fully staged versions of Monteverdi’s operas. Perhaps the costs are too high today – but if we had had to swap either of these events for one of the more familiar operas it would have been a great loss.

Hastings Philharmonic at St Mary in the Castle

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St Mary in the Castle, Saturday 20 May 2017

When Marcio da Silva announced last year that Hastings Philharmonic was launching a fully professional symphony orchestra for the South East it seemed a risky undertaking, yet here we are, and the evidence of success was fully formed at St Mary in the Castle last Saturday. This had to be one of the finest orchestral performances in this building and potentially one which will herald a new era for symphonic music in our area. Where the performance last year of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony had been brave if not quite fully fledged, there was no problem here with either the Beethoven or the Brahms.

The evening opened with a passionate and fiery reading of Beethoven’s Egmont overture, with a crisp attack and real sense of drive and energy throughout. The sudden horn calls at the climax were electrifying and set a level of expectation for the rest of the evening.

Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy is a glorious work unfortunately eclipsed by the finale of the Choral Symphony itself, but here given the sensitivity and delicacy it requires to make a full impact. Andre Dolabella was a limpid and persuasive piano soloist, apparently floated between the orchestra and the raised choral forces. Beethoven indulges himself in a wide range of solo writing, including a lovely passage for string quartet which was very effective before the entrance of the chorus. Here the top sopranos were particularly impressive and the small male force accurate and very well focused.

After the interval – and a group photo – we came to Brahms’ Second Symphony. The tonal palette here is quite different and relies far more heavily on the string textures which have been strengthened and developed into a far more dynamic force since last year. Brahms frequently leads with the lower strings who were more than up to the task with their warm tone and insightful phrasing. The fleetly moving string passages of the third movement were handled with great skill as we moved effortlessly into the finale with its blazing brass chorus and highly extrovert impact.

It was received with great enthusiasm – and rightly so. Marcio da Silva should be proud of what he has achieved so far and the programme now released for next year is both demanding and exciting. Let us hope that somebody of this level of professional skill it not head-hunted too soon!

 

Maidstone Symphony Orchestra

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Mote Hall, Maidstone, Saturday 20 May 2017

There was a lot of B Minor in this concert and it’s a good key for plangency especially in the dying notes of Tchaikovsky’s valedictory masterpiece, the Sixth Symphony. Brian Wright held his orchestra and the audience in rapt tense suspension at the very end of the concert (and the MSO season) before finally dropping his baton to tumultuous applause. It was an appropriate end in another way too as this concert was dedicated to a much loved and much missed veteran, cellist Margaret Chapman who died last month, after 65 years of playing with MSO. She played her last concert with them in February.

At other points in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Brian Wright achieved a good balance between the manic energy (terrific work from brass and percussion) of the Allegro which forms the second half of the first movement and the delicacy of the unsettling five-in-a-bar con grazia second movement. The molto vivace movement packed all the resounding energy it requires – more or less together in the general pauses and exuberant enough to ensure that few people would have noticed the occasional wrong note.

Earlier in the evening Michael Petrov, a charismatic Bulgarian who smiles warmly at the orchestra when he is enjoying their playing, gave us a nicely judged account of the Dvorak cello concerto – more B minor. In the slow lyrical section of the first movement he had the cello itself almost weeping but because this is Dvorak that has to be offset against all those sparky cheerful melodies – and it was. The allegro finale was dramatic, lively and beautifully played. I shall long treasure Petrov’s sensitive duet with MSO leader Andrew Pearson in that movement.

It isn’t easy to start a programme with Night on the Bare Mountain which has a lot of exposed work and is hardly a “warm up” piece. On this occasion MSO really hit the ground running with a very assured, entertaining rendering. The string sound wove in well around the brass blasts and Anna Binney’s tender, warm flute solo at the end was outstanding.

Susan Elkin

CDs/DVDs May 2017

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Ombre Amene
Gabriella di Laccio, soprano; James Akers, guitar
DRAMA MUSICA DRAMA 002

This is a fine combination of pieces which will be unknown to all but the most diligent of connoisseurs. Mauro Giuliani and Fernando Sor were writing at the turn of the nineteenth century and both are here represented by song settings and solo works for guitar. Sor’s Etude 17 is particularly pleasing but is only marginally ahead of the settings themselves. James Akers is a fine exponent of both the solo guitar items and the accompaniments.

Soprano Gabriella di Laccio is more of an acquired taste. She specialises in Baroque music, and her finely honed high soprano, with its rapid vibrato, often makes for edgy attack and a tension which is fully in keeping with the text even if it is not as mellifluous as we would expect from a more romantic approach.

First Drop
Ars Nova Copenhagen, Paul Hillier
CANTALOUPE MUSIC CA 21127

The CD opens with an unaccompanied setting of Rise up my love by Howard Skempton. It is a disarmingly welcoming introduction to a cd which ranges widely from the intensity of Gordon’s he saw a skull to a vocal arrangement of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music for voices – both superbly done. Alongside these are works by Terry Riley, David Lang and Kevin Volans.  Worth seeking out.

Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera
Royal Opera House, Claudio Abbado
OPUS ARTE OA 1236 D

This recording dates from 1975 but I doubt if there are any currently available to match its musical impact and beauty. The production by Otto Schenk may seem dated – how often do we get sets and costumes close to those imagined by the composer? – but it still works well and if only for Placido Domingo the work is well work adding to your collection.

Rachmaninov: Rare Piano Transcriptions
Julia Severus, piano
NAXOS 8.573468

These are fascinating items. Rachmaninov was responsible for transcribing his own works – as well as laying down many of them for player pianos where we can hear the composer himself performing his own works. Here we have twenty-two pieces, plus the longer Suite in D minor which only came to light a few years ago. Julia Severus is a convincing soloist with real romantic flair.

Strauss in St Petersburg
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi
CHANDOS CHAN 10937

There are so many Strauss recordings to choose from, how is a new one to make an impact? Well this does, simply by bringing together works performed while Johann II was in St Petersburg. This includes a single work by Olga Smirnitskaya – Erste Liebe – if only to show that Russian composers were very aware of the Viennese influence! A fine disc and one which had an innate sense of Straussian rhythm without pulling it all over the place – as too many do these days.

Maestro Corelli’s Violins
Collegium Musicum 90, Simon Standage
CHACONNE CHAN 0818

Six concerti by six different contemporaries of Corelli , all giving a strong indication of the wealth of music still to be discovered from the early eighteenth century. Beautifully played and worth the indulgence even if you think you know the period well already.

Bruckner: Symphony No2
Mozarteumorchester, Ivor Bolton
OEHMS OC 447

This is a live recording from Salzburg made in October 2015. Bruckner regularly revised his symphonies and the second exists in at least four versions. This is the earliest, and longest, and as such represents the composer’s own approach to the work before any critics had had any influence over him. Far more rarely heard than the later symphonies, it is still a splendid work in its own right and the recording brings us the immediacy and impact of the composer’s creative genius.

Schubert: String Quartet in G major; String Quartet in C minor Quartettsatz
Doric String Quartet
CHANDOS CHAN 10931

The recording opens with the more familiar Quartettsatz in a muscular, exciting reading. The lesser known Op post 161 has an altogether different level of intensity, very much post-Beethoven in its architecture and dynamics. It is also one of the longest when given its proper length as it is here. This is a fine twin to the earlier release of the quartets based on Rosamunde and Death and the Maiden.

In the stream of life; songs by Sibelius
Gerald Finley, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner
CHANDOS CHAN CHSA 5178

There are so many good things on this cd it is difficult to know where to start. Pohjola’s Daughter and The Oceanides are familiar but given exemplary performances. Alongside these we have the premiere recording of In the stream of life, challenging in its immediacy and even today unexpected in its intensity. With this come seven less familiar song settings and the Op42 Romance. Edward Gardner has produced some very memorable recordings with the Bergen Phil but this has to be one of the best.

Guitarra Mia; Tangos by Gardel and Piazzolla
Franz Halasz, guitar
BIS 2165

Not only does this bring the music of Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla to a wider audience, with beautifully phrased performances throughout, but it leads us – for those like myself with little background in the Tango – to extensive video clips from the films Gardel made in the 1930s. Both well worth investigating.

 

Update from St Nicolas, Pevensey

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Greetings from St Nicolas, Pevensey! As we have an intermission in our restoration work while the bats enjoy their summer roost in the chancel roof, we are taking the opportunity to welcome back a couple of highly accomplished musicians who have entertained us in previous years.

On Friday 9 June, John Collins, organist at St George’s, Worthing, who played here in 2015 and 2016, will give a lunchtime recital of music from across Europe from the 16th to 18th century, including toccatas, variations, sonatas, fugues and voluntaries. The programme will include pieces or arrangements of Handel and Pachelbel, as well as works by living composers. The recital will begin at 1pm. Admission will be by donation and refreshments will be available.

Saturday 12 August will see the return of our Restoration Fund Patron Neil McLaren, who has played his flute for us in several previous summers while he has been performing at the Glyndebourne Festival with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Neil will be joined by Jane Gordon, a highly versatile violinist who also plays regularly with the OAE and is a member of the English Baroque Soloists, for a recital of works by JS and CPE Bach and Telemann. The concert will start at 7pm. Tickets £10. Refreshments will be available.

We look forward to welcoming you back to St Nicolas to experience outstanding musicians playing in our beautiful church with its excellent acoustics.