Lunchtime Concerts: Fiachra Garvey,Piano, 13th March 2025

Once again this season’s Lunchtime Series came up with a surprise and was rewarded with a large audience. Hitherto, though, the surprise tended to be in music off the beaten track, sometimes modern, sometimes of the past and arguably unjustly neglected. There was nothing of that here. Indeed, I was reminded of my childhood when there were regular programmes on the radio with titles like These You have loved and Family Favourites  into which nothing that might offend or surprise ever penetrated! Of course, this concert and what was played was really nothing like that since the programme consisted entirely of master works which had long ago established themselves as memorable and hence become core repertoire. Its delights did also gently remind me how refreshing it had become in the Woke era not to be aware of boxes being ticked.

Then there was the pianist, Fiacra Garvey, paying his first visit to Leicester and introducing each piece with flair and a lilting Irish accent which I am sure signalled to everyone that delight was awaiting them. And indeed it was in the opening piece, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which immediately established our visitor as a pianist of considerable quality. There was a swagger to the playing that fitted this music like a glove, as well as at times a finesse which revealed what treasures there are to be found in this score.

It was followed by three short pieces that are masterpieces of establishing atmosphere, beginning with Debussy’s La Cathedrale Engloutie. I never hear this without having a shudder as the church arises from the waves into a great climax, only to sink once again into the sea. The pianist’s touch captured the wonder and what I always feel is the ultimate sadness in the music.

Albeniz’ s Triana after the Debussy startlingly illustrated to me what an amazing range a grand piano possesses as in a matter of moments we were flown from Brittany to Spain and its gipsy music and then to Venice in one of Mendelsohn’s Songs without Words, Venetian Gondola Song, all of their different hues brought out so tellingly on this occasion by this artist.

And then seamlessly we were swept off to Russia and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Whether or not I was flagging I cannot say. However, clearly the pianist was not. Indeed, he was on fire. However, for the first time in the concert I found myself thinking on occasions that a lighter touch might have brought greater rewards and sharper picturing overall. I felt there was rather more wit to be found in the work than at times emerged and that as a result sometimes the contrasting drama of other pages did not always tell to the degree they can do. I certainly felt that to be so as we approached the final picture, The Great Gate of Kiev. The startling great avalanche of sound that even my recording of the piano version delivers to spine tingling effect did not seem to be felt on this occasion to quite the same degree when one arrived at the final pages of the work. Perhaps this was because the contrast with what had gone before was not that great.

However, it was always a pleasure to hear the original piano version of this work and overall this was a compelling concert, certainly good enough to want to hear more of this artist.

Midday Music Junction 2:Japheth Law, flute,Jen Li ,cello, Daisuke Yoshida,piano, February 13th 2025

The difference between this concert and its predecessor a fortnight ago could hardly have been greater. That attempted to storm the heights of music, with some success, this one was content for the most part to remain in less demanding climes. Yet in its own way it pleased every bit as much. Even though the music was often clearly derivative, rarely showing any innovative intent and as a result for many years ignored, it came over as also extremely accomplished and pleasing. It only occasionally demanded intense attention but sometimes that is fitting at lunchtime especially when it was delivered with such brio as here by Japheth Law ,flute, Gen Li , cello and Daisuke Yoshida, piano. The result at least for this concertgoer was a disarmingly delightful hour tucked away from the miserable weather.

            The concert began with a work entitled Trois Aquarelles by an eminent French flautist and conductor of the early 20c.  Phillipe Gaubert was clearly immersed in the world of Ravel and Debussy and apparently at the time of writing, 1915, only too happy to forget his surroundings on the Western Front by portraying painting in music. Within those terms it was really a rather affecting piece, full of the sounds and liquidity of the more famous composers and very, very French.

            It was followed by extracts from Weber’s Trio for Piano, Flute and Cello Op 63., the last two movements. During my lifetime this composer rather seems to have drifted in and out of public interest. Of course, he is seen as a seminal figure in the rise of German Romanticism and in my youth, it was commonplace to encounter at least his operatic overtures in concert programmes, particularly that which introduces Oberon. His opera Der Freischütz got quite frequent productions and based on my encounters with that work I , alas, made a grave mistake of sitting through what I thought to be the Shakespearean opera only to discover it had nothing to do with the Bard.

It was performed at the Bregenz Festival and featured a production on a floating platform tied to the bank of Lake Constance. In the event I spent the evening gazing at the beauty of the lake and thinking amongst other things how superior was Britten’s then recent opera with lots of fairies in it to what I was paying a lot of money to hear. However, here let it be said that such thoughts were banished in the music of these two movements, firstly in a  setting of a Goethe poem which was a rather beautiful  lament and leading into an ebullient Finale  dispatched with great verve by the ensemble.      

      The concert ended with a performance of Louise Farrenc’s Piano TrioNo.4 .Opus 45 composed in 1845. It has become very much the fashion recently to introduce audiences to forgotten or neglected composers and it has to be said that not infrequently, at least for this listener, the reasons for history’s silence are all too obvious. That was very definitely not my impression here. The programme noted that her style was considered robust and Germanic. Given her French nationality and the fact that she missed the Romantic bus, or perhaps refused to climb aboard, it seemed to me that such alive and inventive music should really not have been so totally forgotten, but then in the world of artistic endeavour fashion can be all. Whatever, these artists rose to the occasion with playing of great energy which fully brought out the composer’s very real verve. I was very sad when it came to end and we were all booted out into the winter gloom

Lunchtime Series: Jess Dandy, Contralto,Keval Shah, Piano, 30th January 2025

I have spent an entire weekend wondering how to do justice to this extraordinary recital and am not much further in arriving at something that seems to me wholly satisfactory. One only has to read the extensive programme notes which almost became a book on one hour’s music that something very serious was in the offing. Both at the concert and afterwards it seemed to me to take a hefty time to absorb it. Indeed, part of my problem was that twice at least during the concert itself I lost my way in the programme notes, which hardly entitles me to write about it. Perhaps, though, in a weird way it does give me the go ahead as an antidote to too much reverence, not least because once or twice in the most earnest moments the shade of Monty Python and the film The Meaning of Life popped into my mind.

            Which is not to say that there were not genuinely wonderful moments in this concert. The musicians themselves deserve great praise. Firstly, I am not sure whether  Keval Shah has been to Leicester before but whatever the truth he revealed himself here as a fine pianist, thriving in the life and beauty of the Lieder chosen for the concert, a fitting partner for the contralto Jess Dandy who was making her debut in the city.

And what a debut! I never heard Kathleen Ferrier live in a concert but I did hear her in my youth live over the radio in Mahler’s Song of the Earth I think from The Edinburgh Festival and it was an experience never to be forgotten. Alas, it became all too soon slightly personal when she was nursed in hospital by my sister in her last dreadful illness. So, it was really rather wonderful to hear a sound of similarly astonishing beauty and musicianship issuing from a singer hitherto unknown to me and performing live just a few yards away. Quite apart from the stamina required in this concert, time and again she went to the heart of music of some of the greatest composers of European song, Schubert, Wolf, Brahms, Bach and Britten. Her performance of the latter’s wonderfully dramatic musical rendering of Donne’s great sonnet Batter my Heart was unforgettable.

So, let there be no doubt there was much in this concert to delight. However, to this listener at least in terms of pleasure it stood the chance of being swamped quite often by what appeared the overarching desire to establish in music similarities between western and Hindu thought, the latter through the music of Reena Esmail. Now, in normal circumstances first impressions of hitherto unknown music can be very wrong but I can only say that on this occasion and in this format in which comparison was the principal name of the game the musical contrast made with some of the western world’s greatest exponents of song had only one result. Increasingly as the concert proceeded, as many passages seemed to do little more that chant and intone, I was taken over by a memory of a similar experience that I could not place. It was only much later when I was struggling with this blog that it came to me that I was feeling the same emotions that I had had in adolescence, oh so long, long ago, when attending service in the Anglican Church, as the psalms, the prayers and the sermons ploughed on with me waiting and waiting for the chance to bellow a right good hymn.

There was just one other effect which lessened for me whatever might have been the effect of the concert and that was the way in which during the hour plus there was very little pause for breath. Whether this was to empathise the similarities between cultures I cannot say but if that was the intention I am afraid it tended to produce in me a state of mind that was anything but philosophical.

So, in summary I felt the concert as a whole to be something of a curate’s egg, though the applause and chat afterwards indicated that there were more than a few who were considerably more positive, or like me, intent on remembering the wonderful singing of Jess Dandy. Bravo democracy!

Lunchtime Series: Nicholas Daniel oboe, Julius Drake Piano, 16th January 2025

In regard this concert, let me say at once that the onward march of mind-blowing excellence of programme and performance in this season’s Lunchtime series shows no sign of faltering. Indeed, one was increasingly lost for words in responding to this journey through the music of Robert and Clara Schumann! And yet why, I wonder, as I write this last sentence, do I appear to be almost apologising, to be almost communicating guilt about seeing no chance to write a more varied critique for the reader?

Well, I came to the conclusion that perhaps the answer lay in an encounter that I had late in the last century and that it was perhaps worth digressing for a moment or two to describe it. The Leicester Gramophone Society was looking for speakers and someone told me that the illustrious music critic of the Guardian, Edward Greenfield, was often willing to travel. I wrote to him, he was more than willing to come and speak and indeed he suggested that his close friend, John Steane, in those days the guru of all things operatic for the Gramophone, should also be approached. There followed over the years a series of wonderful talks on music, no fee was ever asked for and a friendship blossomed with both but in particular with Ted, as he became engaged with Leicester music, in particular with the Festival.

In addition, on a number of occasions I looked him up in his London home in Folgate Street and of course he talked often at length about the role of the critic. He amused me by declaring that he would like to be called an appreciator rather than a critic. I said to him that I doubted that that would work in a newspaper world which is so addicted to drama but the idea that  critics should go to a concert like the public expecting to enjoy themselves seemed to me utterly admirable. One or two American critics of that time, and a very ancient and very influential British critic, Ernest Newman, on the other hand saw the approach as undermining standards even when there was a huge response from concertgoers. I remember, for instance, Harold Schonberg, music critic of one of the New York papers, declaring that he had listened to Britten’s War Requiem over 20 times without discovering any real musical  quality in it and this despite the thunderous public reception it had received around the world!

Sixty years later there can hardly be any doubt in this instance as to who was right and music critics seem to me now more inclined to search for positive things to say, though quite clearly there will always be some to whom dismissal is a first option. (For anyone who is interested, Ted’s obituary in the Guardian is to be found on line and is a fine tribute to a perceptive lover of all things musical and a delightful man.)  

Well, as I was reading my jottings on this concert, I saw that dismissal was nowhere an option. Normally I do incline to approach transcriptions cautiously, seeing them sometimes as basically an attempt to widen the repertoire of musicians playing instruments for whom little top class solo music exists. Quite often one yearns in such circumstances for the original. That that was nowhere felt to be the case here was perhaps down to two things. Firstly, from the beginning to the concert’s end one was aware that in listening to Julius Drake, piano and Nicholas Daniel, oboe one was listening to two great artists, supremely able to enter the sound world of two of the finest geniuses of the Romantic movement. Over and over again I find myself jotting down on the programme words and phrases like beautiful, lovely, liquid sound, wonderful climax, passionate , so much sothat it would be tedious to plod through work after work, movement after movement using the same terminology because those words were the only possible ones to use.  

Perhaps, just one short work epitomizes the wonder of so much of this concert and that was the transposition of the song Mondnacht from Liederkreis, the most instantly recognisable piece of music in the concert and the one where transcription might be thought would bring about serious loss.

On the contrary, with divine playing from both pianist and oboist I don’t think I have ever heard the essence of the song rendered more memorably.

            So quite simply, hats off. And lastly no commentary on this concert would be complete without firstly asking the arrangers, Howard Ferguson, Nicholas Daniel, and Humbart Lucarelli similarly to take a bowand likewise Chairman Kevin Rush who provided a wonderfully detailed programme for the concert. Nothing more to do then except to look forward to the next concert in the series!    

Lunchtime series: Mathilde Milwidsky (violin), Huw Watkins (piano), 12th December 2024

The quality of this season’s Lunchtime concerts has been such that one turns up on a Thursday wondering whether the standard can possibly be maintained. Perhaps it is age softening the brain but in a long life I really cannot recall a run of concerts which I have found so consistently having the wow factor. Yes, it is true to say that over the years these lunchtime concerts have brought much delight but like everything in life there have been gradations in that delight. This concertgoer was therefore much pleased to find KR, he who must be obeyed, remarking in a recent bulletin that this blog was not given to continual hyperbole, and this at a time when there was an imminent possibility of the statement becoming ever more untrue!

            However, what can one say when faced with music making of such joy as was present in this concert given by Mathilde Milwidsky, Violin and Huw Watkins, Piano? The latter has been quite a frequent visitor to Leicester and has made his mark not only as a composer but also as a very fine pianist. Even so I cannot remember him making quite the impact that he did here. Most notable was the way that he coaxed from the Steinway sounds which were so sheerly luscious as almost to make one swoon.

            And what can one say about the violinist that is not of the same nature? She had been once before to Leicester when a concert had to be abandoned early on owing to a medical emergency in the audience. Well, she had the floor to herself in this concert and what an impression she made, a wonderfully rich tone, abundant virtuosity combined with an innate musicality which made for an absolutely magical hour’s music.

            The programme featured two of Ravel’s finest works from the 1920s which are major challenges for any player, opening with his late Sonata in G Minor, a major treasure trove that mined a wide range of contemporary music of the period. In my youth it was common to dismiss this composer as facile compared to Debussy’s supposedly deeper musical world, ignoring how wonderfully scintillating and constantly shifting and wide in mood was the younger composer’s music. The programme comments thoroughly nailed the last movement and indeed much in the rest of the work, describing it as ‘heady’. In this performance the whole work buzzed with innovation as did what finished the concert, the perhaps better known Tzigane. Here the playing again positively fizzed, unforgettably creating the gypsy atmosphere of the piece.

            In all this rocketing music the short pieces in the middle of the sandwich should not be forgotten as contributing to the memories of this outstanding concert. The first of these, two movements from Wynton Marsalis’ Fiddle Dance Suite,inhabited a similar world to the works already reviewed. I read that they were written for Nicola Benedetti at the same time that composer and violinist were working on his violin concerto. It so happens that that work new minted was played in the De Montfort Hall. Suffice to say my feelings about what seemed to me an interminable and unmemorable attempt to take on an unfamiliar genre were very different to my response to these two movements from an original five movement work with its clear overall influences from the world of jazz.    

            By contrast there followed works which in the main struck a different chord in the middle of the concert. First came a contribution by the pianist of the day who of course is also an outstanding composer. This was Elegy written under a commission from a friend whose violinist wife had passed away. This was beautifully played by the composer and created a memorable ten minutes of great tenderness at the centre of the concert.

As did Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne and Cortege which followed it. Of course, the tragically short life of this composer is by now well known, as is her great talent which had little chance to blossom fully. Paradoxically the music she left behind is often full of life as are these two short pieces, particularly the latter that had all the colour of Debussy. It goes almost without saying that the performance delivered all of this.

Well, there is not much more to be said. One can only hope to hear these artists in Leicester again sooner rather than later and to wish all readers of this blog all that is apt for the season. I look forward to the concerts of the new year.

Lunchtime Series : Jack Hancher, (guitar),14th November 2024

This season’s Lunchtime Series continued on its merry way with another hugely successful recital, this time given by the guitarist Jack Hancher. It was approached with some caution by this concertgoer not in any way in regard the artist since he was arriving in Leicester for the first time trailing clouds of glory. No, it concerned what he was bringing with him. The classical guitar is a lovely instrument but the sound it produces perhaps does not sit very easily in some concert halls even of medium size. The Hansom Hall up to this concert had revealed itself at least in regards piano and string sound to have an acoustic which is strikingly good, perhaps even better than that offered by the Museum Gallery.  On the other hand, first impressions of the converted chapel as a pleasingly warm setting for music have been for this listener much more open to question. Despite the building’s impressive scale, I find myself every time I look heavenwards reminded of stern mid-19^th century evangelical religion. That being so, I wondered whether the comparatively gentle and often sensuous world of the guitar would even be heard, never mind appreciated.

            Well, I needn’t have worried. The first works played, John Dowland’s Praeludium, Fantasia, Forlorne Hope Fancy came through clear even at the quietist moments. Immediately what was established was that we were hearing playing of consummate quality in music that deserved to have been brought into the sunlight. This was no antiquarians’ exercise but one that spoke to the heart. This is hardly surprising. By all accounts English music of the period was celebrated throughout Europe. Indeed, I think the first time I heard of the composer was on holiday many years ago in northern Denmark, though it could have been Rose Tremain’s novel Music and Silence written about the same time that started the hunt. Naturally with my background a visit to Elsinore was a must. I had often wondered why Shakespeare should have placed what is perhaps the most famous drama ever written in this setting when so often he went south to look for material. The answer was not hard to find. There was textual support for there being ties between the English and Danish courts of the era particularly when it came to the entertainment industry of the time. The first major Fool of Shakespeare’s company, Will Kemp, he who, after being sacked, to raise cash danced all the way from Norwich to London, was mentioned as being on a visit to Elsinore in 1585, so it should not be that surprising that a fellow musician should follow in his wake.

            That we were to hear a programme which in its contrasts was to be constantly beguiling was indicated by what came next. Malcolm Arnold’s Fantasy for Guitar proved to be a work of great variety full of the composer’s wit and life, so much so that afterwards I found myself very saddened by how those elements gradually faded away as a result of the mania that increasingly affected him in later life. The performance seemed to capture the composer’s ebullient ever-changing world to perfection.

            Next, we were presented with two short pieces by contemporary composers, firstly Laura Snowden’s The Memory Garden and then Dani Howard’s You Don’t have to Tell me twice. Call me an old sentimentalist but to my surprise I found the former perhaps the most moving moment in the programme. Its musical language was certainly not revolutionary but in its own terms it seemed to speak from the heart of her love for her grandmothers. In the context, at least for me, it was a hard act to follow for Dani Howard. Her piece certainly had its musically diverting moments but I am afraid its connection with the philosophical pondering of the programme notes escaped me.

            And so we reached the end of the recital with the second piece Benjamin Britten wrote for Julian Bream, Nocturnal after John Dowland, composed in 1963, ten years after Lachymae. At the end of a strenuous hour, it was given a performance worthy of its status. However, I had not heard it for a long time and, unlike Lachrymae, do not have it on disc. The earlier work for me has always been one of Britten’s greatest works, utterly novel in structure and rising to one of the most wonderful conclusions in music.No doubt also through listener fatigue, I found myself here rather struggling to detect in the later work music quite of the same inspiration, diverting though it was at times for sure. Over many years of worship at the feet of this composer I can think of little if anything in his output that is to be dismissed and that certainly was not the case here. In addition it made me very certain of one thing. I very much look forward to hearing Jack Hancher again.

Lunchtime Series: Fibonacci Quartet, 31st October, 2024

Over nearly 30 years there has been on offer any amount of fine music making under the auspices of LIMF, so much so that one’s memory can sometimes fail when attempting to place the latest offering in some kind of pecking order. The period of Covid, with the inevitable difficulties that that created in regard to live concert going, muddied judgement further in the context of what was possible and what was not. In regard chamber music, it was the string ensemble perhaps that suffered most, firstly because of medical restrictions on groups and secondly because it also often put the greatest strain on beleaguered finances. Given the fact that within the music for string ensemble there is to be found by far chamber music’s greatest contribution to the wonders of classical music and it is hardly surprising that post Covid this form of music making has struggled on the road to recovery. Though one has been thankful that live music is back, the wow factor has until recently not always been particularly in evidence, at least to this concertgoer.

            That was until this Autumn, with a Festival which had a great deal of fine music making in performances right up to Festival standard and in regard the concert programming evidence of a great deal of thought.  That trend, to judge from the first three concerts, looks set to continue in this winter’s Lunchtime series and it was this general good cheer which set me a thinking as I stood waiting for a taxi home after the first appearance in Leicester of the quartet Fibonacci. My thoughts went simply like this: Have I ever in a long life ever heard a concert better than this?  Should it not join a short stellar list which would include some of the outstanding moments it has been my good fortune to experience? Or am I losing my sense of proportion?

            Well, no, I don’t think that I am! This was a concert to remember right from its very beginning in that the Hansom Hall was in the firing line. This was the first time its acoustic had been exposed to the full-on sound of a string quartet and there was felt to be a distinct possibility the venue would struggle to cope. In the event nothing could have been further from the actuality. What emerged was a wonderfully warm and detailed sound about which one of the players positively cooed when introducing the final work of the concert.

            Of course, the quality of the playing of the ensemble had something to do with it! From the very outset their playing of Florence Price’s Adoration announced something very special despite this listener at least thinking that yet another performance of this work would amount to overkill. In the event the playing was of such quiet tenderness that the work emerged new minted. It proved to be also an excellent start to a concert given over from then on to music of the very greatest musical energy, constantly speaking in an utterly personal voice.

Again to my surprise, this was true of Mozart’s String Quartet No 16 in E major where this performance found ample evidence of the composer being already in musical territory hitherto unvisited. Time and again these players communicated the excitement of the music as unexpected turn followed unexpected turn, coupled of course with much that flowed delightfully without a sign of the labour that usually goes with composition.  It was an enchanting experience.

However, on paper it was to be followed by a work that made much sterner demands on the listener, Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4. I struggled to remember when I had last heard a live performance of any of this composer’s Quartets. I think it must go back 30 to 40 years when The Lindsays were regularly in town and regularly playing 20c repertory that fascinated. Well, I felt back in that territory here with the opening movement clearly designed to blow one out of one’s seat. From mostly gentle rolling hills we were transported to the North Face of the Eiger. But my goodness the view was mind boggling even a century after its composition. One noticed that the two violins swapped seats for this final work which must say something about the musical unity this quartet has achieved. Whatever, they placed before us all the swings and turns and surprise of this work. It is true that the quartet communicated astonishing energy in many places but it was certainly not in your face all the time. The composer’s night music vein here was communicated with all wonder of this mysterious world and I have never before been made so aware of the composer’s delight in pushing things to their limit as in the fourth Pizzicato movement. But then these players over and over again mined the treasures of this work in all its facets and deservedly received an ovation the like of which I suspect is not always to be heard even today at the conclusion of a mid- life Bartok composition.

All that remains to be said is that to judge from that applause there are many Leicester concertgoers hoping that this quartet will be heard very soon again in our city.

Lunchtime Concert : Ivana Gavric piano,Hansom Hall, Leicester 3rd October 2024

Hot on the heels of an outstanding Festival came the first concert of the Winter 2024 /25 Lunchtime Series, as with the Festival, in its new venue of the Hansom Hall for a year or more. It also featured the debut in Leicester of the pianist Ivana Gavric, as well as the first time that this listener had experienced the Museum’s magnificent Steinway in its new setting. It proved to be an outstanding hour’s music.

            On paper the programme put together by the pianist looked to have been the product of much thought and indeed the result was a fascinating musical   journey. First and last we heard two well-known orchestral works by major composers but in their original settings for piano, with in between two works by women composers of the same era, to some extent known in their time but since then virtually forgotten. Throughout the result was compelling.

            The concert opening with Grieg’s Holberg Suite in the original setting for piano provided quite a shock, at least for this concertgoer who had long ago become accustomed to the orchestral version. For a moment or two I wondered whether the pianist had yet to get used to the instrument and perhaps the acoustics might be tending to be rather in one’s face.  Then, gradually I became accustomed to the sound, also realising that the composer’s setting for strings that I had been used to for more years than I care to admit obviously delivered a significantly softer outline than would most pianos. In the end I was relishing this wonderfully lithe, at times dramatic, performance.

            It was followed by two movements Autrefois and Norwegienne from Cecile Chaminade’s Pieces Humoristiques Op.87. composed in 1897. It appears she was very popular in this era and was awarded a medal by the late Queen Victoria. I say ‘late’ just to emphasise the range of a person’s life if they live for a long time. She was born in the same year as Elgar and yet she died in 1944 when I guess some in Thursday’s audience were ‘enjoying’ a wartime childhood. (I know three at least but I am not letting on!)

            Of course, that has little to do with anything unless the resurrection of these two pieces was justified musically and I for one certainly found they were. Yes, they could hardly be said to be in anyway stamped with originality but they certainly conveyed freshness in regard such things as melody and given the way they were played here, with such tenderness, surely deserved an occasional outing now that we are no longer in fear of Schoenberg or Boulez.

The same was true in regard Dora Pejacevic’s  Erinnerrung Op.24 ,a song without words. She lived a short life within the central European aristocracy, dying in childbirth just after end of the Great War. The piece was 4 minutes of considerable lyric beauty and was lovingly played.

            And so, we reached the substantial final work in the programme, the original Le Tombeau de Couperin written for piano by Ravel during a period of convalescence during the Great War. Listening to it in the context of the programme confirmed that this concert was so much more than a haphazard coming together of a number of pieces the artist liked playing. Here it seemed the listener was invited at almost every turn to see connections and to think in a wider context. It is, though, firstly important to praise the quality of the performance.  My programme is littered with comments and vocabulary such as a wonderful light touch, singing tone ,delicacy, sparkling, rumbustious, summing up the performance as a pure delight , these are just a few comments of what was scribbled. This was a performance to die for.

            However, it was so much more than a display of pianistic virtuosity. It invited thought about how composers meet the challenges of cataclysmic events in the world in which they live, perhaps like Britten and Shostakovich using traditional musical language, conversely like others deciding to tear up the rule book and start western music all over again with the usual result that they mostly lost their audience outside their coterie. Then there are those who, if you are uncharitable, simply buried themselves in the past, leaving their daring behind and adopting ancient, well tried and comfortable means of composition. Such seems to have been the reaction by some to Ravel’s sole wartime composition.

            Perhaps, though, things are not quite that simple. I found myself thinking of Vaughan Williams who in 1908 enrolled as a pupil of Ravel, only to be told after a short period that he already had a distinctive voice and didn’t need any advice from a fellow composer. Vw’s wartime experience almost exactly paralleled that of Ravel and furthermore he wrote music after the war in his third symphony entitled the Pastoral that was thought for a long time to be rooted in the English countryside and some sort of escape from remembrances, until quite recently it became clear that the countryside was not that of England but of Northern France. Lark Ascending was composed around the same time and I have long felt the joy there is mixed with the elegiac. I can only say that moments in this performance of the Ravel invited similar thoughts which I carried with me out into the afternoon such was the quality and range of the performance and I look forward to a return visit soon.

Leicester International Music Festival, September 19th -21st September 2024

Firstly, an apology for the apparent lateness of the posting of this blog but our hardworking and esteemed Chairman Kevin Rush indicated that he was off on a well-deserved holiday this week and hence would be unable to place it in the system until his return. Therefore, I have taken the opportunity to write at leisure. Whether the result will be any the better, who can say? Sometimes pressure can be helpful in concentrating the mind.

One thing can be said, though, straightaway. This festival was indeed a welcome return to form. Perhaps on paper it looked rather lacking in the familiar but in the event the music chosen ticked two essential features of a good Festival. The music heard in the first two concerts was within its genre of a quality which consistently gained this listener’s attention. In addition it had a refreshing variety and we had with us for the duration a notable contemporary composer, Elena Langer.

Lastly, what could have been a major disruption of venue arising from the closure and refurbishing of parts of the New Walk Museum was triumphantly surmounted by a switch to the Cathedral for the opening concert and to the Hansom Hall for the other two. The latter brought with it the discovery for many of the audience a fine concert venue hitherto quite unknown even to those who have lived in the city for many years. Alas, though in the stories of mice and men things rarely go entirely smoothly and the third concert faced major upheaval. No praise is high enough for Kevin Rush, our chairman, in the way, and this is an apt figure of speech, he kept the ship afloat. But more of that later.

The first concert, the one in the cathedral, offered much pleasure. The opening work, Conversations for oboe, flute and string trio by Arthur Bliss, brought this listener many moments of delight. This is not the first time that LIMF have reminded me of the range of this composer’s music and in particular his chamber music. I notice that I have recordings on my shelves of one or two of his well-known works for large orchestra but have not played them for years nor heard of them being much performed. However, chamber ensembles seem to bring out a less public, often delightful and varied vein of musical invention. Here was wit, at times even stridency, mixed with a beguiling lyricism which made it an ideal opening to the festivities, particularly, when played by artists of the quality of Katya Apekishiva, piano, members of the Carducci String Quartet, Adam Walker, flute and Nicholas Daniel, oboe. One wonders in the century since it was written whether it can have had better ambassadors. For Grace Williams ‘s Sonatina for flute and Piano it was a hard act to follow. It was clearly a pleasurable piece of music but I could not discern much of an individual voice, which could clearly not be said about what followed it before and after the interval.

Before the interval, we heard more of Madeleine Dring’s music. I wrote at some length last December about a midday concert featuring her music played by Nicholas Daniel and Antonio Oyarzabal which celebrated the centenary of her birth and this review can be read on Word Press under the same heading as this blog. Suffice it to say here that the Trio for oboe ,flute and piano  in its wit, in its lyrical quality bore out my first impressions. Musical criticism of the last century has sometimes valued the ability to write a memorable tune as a rather inferior gift, an attitude one guesses that is hardly the standpoint of your average concertgoer. Britten for one disagreed and said for good measure that he found it the hardest thing to carry off in any composition. Well, Madeleine Dring to judge from this work clearly thrived in this aspect of music as witnessed in the lovely slow movement of this Trio. Just gorgeous!  

There was more pleasure to come after the interval. Firstly, the audience was given a real jolt in Elena Langer’s Figaro’s Dances for piano which had its roots in the composer’s well received opera of 2016, Figaro Gets a Divorce and was written for Katya Apekisheva in 2022. This proved to be huge fun, demanding stunning virtuosity, which of course it received from the dedicatee. However, part of the fun was also recognizing the spirit of Mozart preserved in a modern idiom. It was followed by Michael Tippett’s Prelude, Recitative and Aria for oboe, flute and piano a short piece again exquisitely shaped and hovering between astringency and moments, particularly for piano, of liquid beauty.

So to the final work of the concert, Peter Warlock’s The Curlew for tenor, flute, cor anglais and string quartet. This was the lengthiest piece of the concert, it introduced to Leicester another artist, the tenor Hugo Hymas, and was clearly intended to crown what had gone before. In some ways it did. The soloist produced a beautifully sung performance. However, in the end my withers were somewhat unrung. Part of my problem was that the text was not in the programme and this proved a serious deficiency, particularly in the cathedral acoustic in which the battle for a singer to shape a musical phrase and at the same time convey speech is intense. Perhaps because I was making out little of the words, after the impressive opening I increasingly found little that suggested much musical development that really grabbed the attention. A pity since the rest of the concert had been so compelling.

The next day the caravan fetched up at the new venue, the Hansom Hall, and we settled down to a concert of baroque or neo baroque music which was consistently delightful. In addition to some who had played the night before, we were joined by Anna-Liisa Bezrodny and Katerina Nazerova violin, Ting Ru Rai, viola , Richard Gowers ,Harpsichord, saw the return of Asok Klouda, cello and very importantly the debut of Hilary Cronin, soprano who had an exceptionally busy evening ahead.

The concert started as it was to go on, a Donne poem entitled Breake of Day , Elena Langer setting great poetry to music for soprano flute, oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. About the poetry in question here, Stay O sweet, doing some groundwork, I found it had been subject to the kind of academic argument so beloved of University Dons. My ancient Oxford edition has the lines consigned to the back of the edition as ‘attributed to John Donne’, thus seeming to question whether it was written by the great man. Surfing the internet suggests few have go down that road now and certainly the result was ravishing music when sung as it was here.

            Next, we entered the world of Handel in Trio Sonata HWV 393 for oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. I have just finished reading a book by Jane Glover on the composer’s years in London, which has increased my suspicion that in the world of music there has been no composer more capable than he of producing great music with ravishing texture and melody at a drop of a hat. Here the gorgeous Andante and then the Largo were evidence of that, especially when played with such superb artistry as here. It was a feast. Even that , though, was surpassed by the performance of two of  the composer’s German Arias , not published until the last century, memorable beyond praise  when sung with such beauty by Hilary Cronin.

            It was the meat in the sandwich, with on either side, firstly Elizabeth Maconchy’s Bagatelles for Oboe and harpsichord and secondly J.C Bach’s Quintet n D major for oboe ,flute, violin, viola, cello. This comment is not intended to be condescending. In their own way both works were consistently lively and jolly music and the Bach in particular made an ideal end to the concert, sending us out into the dark, if I was to judge the feeling around me correctly, that we had listened to a hugely satisfying evening’s music and were looking forward to the Festival’s final concert.

            And so we reached the last concert, or rather several of us didn’t. I could not but think of it all in some musical context of the ancient gods. It was as if in the first two concerts Apollo, the Greek Sun God and God of music, had benignly ordered up clement weather so that the Leicester aged and infirm should be able to stagger into the centre with ease, only for the local head god Thor, or as he appears in Wagner’s Ring cycle, Donner, in both guises capable of causing monumental damage through thunder and lightning, had taken grave offence and rained down on the city some of the worst thunder storms I can ever remember. He reserved the last venting of electricity and water just in the  hour of travel so that was achingly the end of it for at least the majority of one family and one family friend. It was infuriating.

            However, all was not lost. One son and one grandson had been watching a waterlogged Leicester City and managed to stagger to the concert, as did a number of redoubtable Leicester folk. In addition in an act of heroism a victim of the God’s malevolence, the tenor Hugo Hymas, refused to cancel because of a sore throat and gave a performance of the final work of the Festival, Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge, that moved my offspring greatly.

So the nasties of the ancient world did not entirely prevail and we now look forward in no time at all, next Thursday October 3^rd, to the opening concert of the winter Lunchtime Series at the Hansom Hall, a piano recital given by Ivana Gavric. It starts at 1 o’clock.

Museum Lunchtime concert: Theo Platt, Keval Shah, 11th April 2024

Firstly, one of the most famous poems in the English Language, Keats’ sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. It goes thus:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet never did I breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and with all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Why the poem? Well, I know of nothing that distills better the moment, in reading, in listening to music, in looking at a picture, when the reader, the listener, the gazer feels that they have had the stunning experience that only art can communicate. Such an experience occurred to me in the opening moments of the last Thursday concert of the Winter season at the Museum given by the baritone Thomas Platt and his piano accompanist Keval Shah. I have delayed writing about it since I  knew that I was going to hear the English Touring Opera in Stravinsky’s A Rake’s Progress at Curve this week and I felt I needed to hear some other operatic voices to verify that I was not exaggerating when I thought that last Thursday I had come across a voice that had reminded me of some of the great singers of the last 60 years.Was I delusional to think that here and there I was reminded of Thomas Allen, of Fischer- Dieskau, even a whiff of Boris Christoff such was the range of the voice and the singer’s responsiveness to the word? Well, I think not. This was voice totally under control across a wide range, dramatic but also capable of great beauty.

        All of this became apparent from the very first item in the programme, a James Macmillan setting of a poem by the Scottish poet William Soutar called The Children, a poem describing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Its powerful simplicity was given music that was immensely moving in the straightforwardness that at times is so characteristic of the composer. It was made all the more powerful here by the singer declaiming the opening whilst slightly outside the hall and thus quite separate from the piano, so giving to the performance as he advanced towards the platform a sense of a processional with the piano picking up the horror of the scene. It reminded me of Britten who in works such as Curlew River used this device to great effect.

            After this the credentials of the pair as singer and pianist of German and French song were established in songs from Schumann’s Kerner Lieder followed by Poulenc’s Le Fraicheur et le feu.  Here there seemed to be an instant and completely confident response to the varied tone of the songs.

           Then we were in the last part of the concert presented with the often harrowing world of racial suffering in the American South in a series of American songs, Shawn E. Okpebholo’s Two Black Churches, Ballad of Birmingham and The Rain, Richard Farina’s Birmingham Sunday, Margaret Bond’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers and William Grant Stills’s  Grief . These were sung and played with great feeling. Particularly striking in the first was the expressive writing for piano. In the second the singing was wonderfully fluid at times and in the third I will remember for a long time the softness of the rendering of the line ‘I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong. There was much one could have written about a number of felicities in the last two of the songs listed though I was grateful to reach the vitality of the final piece in the concert, Florence Price’s energetic My Dream which effectively brought the concert to a moderately up beat ending and ensured that we did not go home sobbing our hearts out. It was a triumphant ending to a triumphant concert and I would dearly like to hear both artists again in the not too distant future, perhaps in a mainly English programme, with one of the Britten song cycles at its centre.

So that is the end of the Winter season in which there have been quite a number of outstanding concerts. Top of the heap to my mind were the concerts given by following . Firstly, there was the astonishing Pelleas Ensemble consisting of the seemingly unlikely combination of flute ,viola and harp which made of transcribed works utterly memorable music. Then our director partnered by the pianist Antoino Oyaizabal gave a delightful concert centred on  the music of Madeline Dring but culminating in beautiful, beautiful arrangements by Vaughan Williams of English folk songs.

That was followed several weeks later by Helene Clement and Alasdair Beatson Viola and Piano taking a mezmerising musical journey through the relationships that Frank Bridge and Imogen Holst had with Benjamin Britten that culminated in a performance of the latter’s deep and knotty masterpiece Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland that was as revealing as any that I have heard. And lastly there was the concert reviewed above.

So, we were hardly lacking in music making to remember. However, in truth I finished thinking that this winter series was not really one of the most memorable and that the reason was not hard to gauge. It lay in the self evident fact that music for string trio, quartet and quintet, which surely harbours by far the greatest number of works of genius to be found in chamber music, was totally absent from the programme and I don’t think I can remember that happening any time in the past. When it was coupled with the exclusion of piano works not composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there was thus a huge chunk of the most inspired chamber music rendered unavailable for the season and that that was a hole not to be filled by such things as music for massed brass,at least not for me.

Lastly, though, we should all be hugely grateful that we have people like Nicholas Daniel and Kevin Rush willing to put so much time into making sure that Leicester gets music of real quality year after year particularly in the present atmosphere of mild hostility to the arts by people who should know better.