Kings Place Festival 2009 - Programme by Lowri Williams

Festival Programme

Contents Friday Programme Saturday Programme Sunday Programme Festival Curators Exhibitions Kings Place Music Foundation Festival Food and Drink Festival 100: Daily Schedule

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Welcome to the Kings Place Festival ’09. This unique event features a staggering 100 concerts in three days – a genre-defying selection that brings together classical, contemporary, blues, world, folk, jazz and spoken-word – a selection that allows both new and old audiences to taste what they can expect from our 2009/10 season. You, our audience, are of paramount importance to us, and after listening to your comments we have made some changes for this year’s Festival, including this more detailed Programme book with notes on every concert, as well as providing more seating in the public spaces and proper cups in the café! Our Festival opens every morning with a free performance of John Cage’s extraordinary Music for Amplified Toy Pianos – well worth getting here early for! Many other free events take place across the weekend in our Atrium; including music from Alamire, Spitz and The Clerks. Throughout the Festival you can enjoy exhibitions in Kings Place Gallery and Pangolin London, and we are delighted to be hosting the Words Converge art installation in partnership with Poet in the City. This will enable visitors to Kings Place to engage with poetry in new and exciting ways. Finally, thanks to all of the supporters of Kings Place who have made our first year so successful, whether music-lover, café-lover or musician. We hope that this Programme will be a lasting souvenir of a memorable weekend at Kings Place. So, sit back and enjoy an array of fantastic music, thoughtprovoking spoken-word events, art installations, exhibitions, and delicious food and drink.

FRIDAY 4

▼ CURATED BY CHRISTOPH RICHTER

Mendelssohn Plus

In the 200th birthday year of one of my most beloved and admired composers, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, I would like to present his music with the music of composers close to him – his greatest influence from the past, JS Bach, his contemporary and close friend Robert Schumann, and, looking forward to the future, Johannes Brahms. When Mendelssohn was just 20 years-old he conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin, in the first performance of this piece since it was premiered almost exactly 100 years earlier. Mendelssohn’s grandmother Sara had been the favourite pupil of Friedemann Bach, son of JS, and the original manuscript of the St Matthew Passion was in the hands of one of the closest friends of Mendelssohn’s family. This performance was the start of a rediscovery of Bach’s music and Bach became one of the most important influences on Mendelssohn’s later compositions. So it is a fitting link to perform this beautiful air from the St Matthew Passion in our programme. The third movement of the Sonata in D major for viola da gamba also shares several characteristics with the famous ‘Erbarme Dich’ aria with violin obbligato from the same Passion, in mood, rhythmic structure and key. ‘He is the Mozart of the 19th century, the brightest musician, who looked the most clearly through the contradictions of his time and was the first to reconcile them.’ These are the words of Robert Schumann about Mendelssohn, for whom Schumann held the greatest respect and whose ‘Songs without Words’ were the inspiration for Schumann’s shorter pieces such as the Papillons, Kinderszenen and especially the Fantasiestücke (originally called Soiréestücke) which we will perform. Mendelssohn founded the Konservatorium für Musik in Leipzig and asked Schumann to be the teacher of composition. He greatly admired Schumann’s string quartets, which were dedicated to him, and conducted the premieres of Schumann’s first and second symphonies. Mendelssohn had a great influence on Brahms. Not only were Mendelssohn’s sonatas for cello and piano an important bridge between those of Beethoven and Brahms, but also the middle movement structure of many works by Mendelssohn, where he invented a certain type of Allegretto-Andante scherzando, was later developed by Brahms in his Scherzos, Intermezzos etc. One of the best examples is the Andante of Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata Op.45. Mendelssohn also developed monothematic movements (eg. the first movement of this cello sonata) which Brahms took as an example, and which, much later, Anton Webern developed as an idea. Christoph Richter

Mendelssohn Plus Bach Hall One 9.30am Friday 4 September Christoph Richter cello Andrew Tortise tenor Nicola Eimer piano Bach Recitativo 'Mein Jesus schweigt' and 'Aria Geduld!' from the St Matthew Passion for tenor, cello and basso continuo Mendelssohn 'Der Blumenkranz', 'Auf Flügeln des Gesanges' Mendelssohn Variations Concertantes Op.17 (8 vns) Bach Sonata in D major BWV 1028 Adagio; Allegro; Andante; Allegro It was Felix Mendelssohn who was responsible for initiating the revival of Bach’s religious music in the nineteenth century when he conducted the St Matthew Passion in 1829. The music had languished unperformed because, as Mendelssohn lamented, Bach was ‘generally viewed as an unintelligible musical arithmetician.’ Mendelssohn’s songs – there are more than one hundred of them – are sadly neglected today, probably because he did not try to plumb the emotional depths of the lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf. His was a different ethos and his songs were intended for domestic performance, to be sung around the piano. ‘Der Blumenkranz’ (The Garland) dates from the year of Mendelssohn’s St Matthew Passion revival and is a delicate setting of a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath after Thomas Moore. It begins: ‘On Celia’s tree in the quiet night/ Hung flowers, a pledge of true love!’ ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (On Wings of Song) is one of Mendelssohn’s best-known songs. It sets a poem by Heinrich Heine, starting: ‘On wings of song/ My heart’s beloved, I will carry you far away.’ Mendelssohn’s Variations Concertantes also date from 1829 and he wrote them for his brother Paul, who was a fine cellist. There are eight variations on a lyrical theme and Mendelssohn and his brother probably gave the first performance of the Variations at one of the concerts at the family home outside Berlin. Very little is known about why, when and for whom Bach wrote his three sonatas for viola da gamba or cello and keyboard. They were possibly composed for the outstanding virtuoso Carl Friedrich Abel, who was gamba player at the court at Cöthen, where Bach was employed for six years from 1717, and where he wrote some of his most notable instrumental music, including the Brandenburg Concertos.

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Mendelssohn Plus Schumann

Mendelssohn Plus Brahms

Hall One 10.45am Friday 4 September Christoph Richter cello Andrew Tortise tenor Nicola Eimer piano

Hall One 12.00 noon Friday 4 September Christoph Richter cello Andrew Tortise tenor Nicola Eimer piano

Schumann Fantasiestücke Op.73 Zart und mit ausdruck; Lebhaft, leicht; Rasch und mit Feuer Schumann Six songs from Liederkreis, Op.24 ‘Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage’ ‘Es treibt mich hin’ ‘Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen’ ‘Lieb Liebchen, leg’s Händchen’ ‘Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden’ ‘Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann’ Mendelssohn Sonata in B-flat major Op.45 Allegro vivace; Andante; Allegro assai

Mendelssohn Song without words in A-flat major for solo piano, Op.38/6 Brahms Three songs, Op.71 ‘Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze!’ Op.71 No. 1 ‘Geheimnis’ Op.71 No. 3 ‘Minnelied’ Op.71 No. 5 Mendelssohn Song without words in D major Op.109 Brahms Sonata in F major Op.99 Allegro vivace; Adagio affettuoso; Allegro passionate; Allegro molto

‘Schumann is one of the finest men I know,’ Mendelssohn once remarked, and the feeling was mutual. ‘I met Mendelssohn yesterday. What a refreshing man! With him everything abounds with riches,’ Schumann wrote in his diary. In 1849 the Schumanns were living in Dresden where Robert began a series of short pieces for various solo instruments and piano, some of them featuring players from the Court Orchestra. ‘All the instruments are having a turn,’ Clara observed. The Fantasiestücke for clarinet and piano were the first of these to be completed, and Schumann also sanctioned performances on the violin or cello. He took the title from E T A Hoffmann, and his direction attacca shows that the three pieces were conceived as a continuous suite. The Liederkreis, Op.24 is the earliest of Schumann’s great song cycles and sets poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) of 1827. Schumann wrote this Liederkreis in 1840 just before his marriage to Clara, and during a time when the couple were still fighting her father’s legal actions against their union. The cycle is a musical portrayal of a Romantic hero, the first six songs ranging in mood from the excitement of impatient longing to calm tenderness, exhausted depression and angry defiance. Mendelssohn composed the first of his two cello sonatas in 1838 during a characteristically busy year conducting his orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and travelling and directing all over Germany. Despite contracting measles he still managed to write three string quartets and a violin sonata as well as this cello sonata. ‘The sonata is the purest absolute music,’ Schumann wrote. ‘As beautiful, clear and characteristic as has ever emerged from the hands of a great artist.’

In 1836 Mendelssohn first met the woman who was to become his wife, Cécile Jeanrenaud. Mendelssohn was immediately captivated and admitted that he was ‘dreadfully in love’. Shortly afterwards he wrote a nocturne-like piano piece for Cécile called Duett ohne Worte (Duet without words), an instrumental love duet which was later published as the sixth of his Songs without words, Op.38. After writing nearly fifty Songs without words for piano, Mendelssohn’s last work with this title was for cello and piano, a beautiful piece in D major, which he wrote for the French cellist Lisa Cristiani in 1845. Brahms had great respect for Mendelssohn’s music and one of the few references to him in Brahms’ letters is a request to his publisher for some of Mendelssohn’s piano music, church pieces and songs. Brahms was the godfather of the Schumann’s youngest son Felix, who was named after Mendelssohn. In 1877, the year of his Second Symphony, Brahms wrote nearly two-dozen songs. The three here, from his Op.71, begin with the gently ironic ‘Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze!’ (Love is so delightful in springtime!) Then ‘Geheimnis’ tells of trees whispering of a secret love, and ‘Minnelied’ is a love-song. Brahms wrote the second of his two cello sonatas in 1886 on Lake Thun in Switzerland. He had recently completed his Fourth symphony and during this particularly productive summer Brahms wrote his Second Violin Sonata and Third Piano Trio as well as the Second Cello Sonata. Enchanted by the landscape, he went on long walks. The beautiful views of the old town and castle on one side and the impressive mass of mountains ranging up to the Jungfrau on the other could well have inspired the heroic, trumpet-like calls of the opening of this grand cello sonata. Jeremy Hayes

▼ CURATED BY ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

OAE Education

4 Led by the players themselves, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment makes music with a commitment, enjoyment and enthusiasm that isn’t just confined to the concert hall. These free events give you a taster of the OAE’s incredibly active education programme. Featuring creative music workshops, a coffee concert where you can meet members of the OAE, and an opportunity to see a new piece performed with students from the Royal Academy of Music, there really is something for everyone. And of course, why not finish the day by coming along to one of the Orchestra’s evening concerts too!

Sing Out Loud Hall Two 9.45am Friday 4 September Why not start the new term with a vocal workshop? Many of the OAE’s players were enthused by music at school and so feel strongly that as an orchestra they have a lot to offer in the sphere of music education. This event for primary school children will be led by vocal animateur Rachel Coward and members of the OAE education team. The children will get the chance to play musical games and learn about singing in a fun and exciting way.

Music at Coffee Time Hall Two 11.00am Friday 4 September Coma and join some of the Orchestra’s players for an informal concert over coffee. This event is a chance for adults who enjoy classical music to meet with other music fans in a relaxed setting. There will also be an opportunity to chat to some of the musicians and discuss their work.

From Bach to Beethoven and Beyond Hall Two 12.15pm Friday 4 September For this event, chief executive Stephen Carpenter will give an insight behind the scenes of the OAE and what goes into managing the Orchestra. He will be joined by a group of Royal Academy of Music students – together with animateur Rachel Leach and some players from the OAE and the London Sinfonietta – who will be performing Mrs Spencer Waits, a creative new piece in response to Heiner Goebbels’ Songs of Wars I Have Seen.

▼ CURATED BY THE GUARDIAN

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Meet the Journalist: Behind the Scenes at The Guardian

This series of events continues our fruitful relationship with The Guardian, whose new offices are here at Kings Place. Featuring deputy editor Paul Johnson, arts editor Melissa Denes and writer Patrick Barkham, the talks aim to give a glimpse behind the headlines to reveal just how a story makes its journey to the page. Essential viewing for anyone interested in the challenges and opportunities facing the modern media.

Paul Johnson – Secrets of the Story St Pancras Room 10.00am Friday 4 September Paul Johnson is deputy editor of Guardian News and Media, and head of news, business and sport. Educated at Cardiff University, his first newspaper job was as a graduate trainee with Wolverhampton’s Express and Star. He joined The Guardian as a reporter covering the Midlands and was then appointed Irish correspondent, winning awards for his reporting in the 1980s when the violence was at its height. He was a member of the award-winning teams that investigated the ‘cash for questions’ scandal and the inquiry into former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken. As assistant editor and then deputy editor, he played a leading role in The Guardian’s transformation into the Berliner format in 2005.

Melissa Denes – Secrets of the Story St Pancras Room 11.15am Friday 4 September Melissa Denes has been The Guardian’s Arts Editor since 2006. Before that, she was assistant editor of the paper’s Weekend magazine, and features editor at The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. She has also written film reviews for Harpers & Queen, book reviews for The Daily Telegraph and a number of interviews for The Guardian, predominantly with writers, film-makers, actors and photographers. In her talk, Melissa will discuss how The Guardian plans and puts its arts coverage together, from the initial ideas stage, through commissioning and writing, to putting the final polish on pages and web content. She’ll be going behind the scenes of some of the paper’s greatest triumphs and near-misses, revealing how a 21st-century newsroom gets to grips with 21st-century culture.

Patrick Barkham – Secrets of the Story St Pancras Room 12.30pm Friday 4 September Patrick Barkham is a staff writer for The Guardian. During nine years at the paper, he has worked as Australia correspondent, as a home news reporter and as an online journalist for guardian.co.uk. Patrick has also worked as a home news reporter for The Times. His articles have covered a wide range of subjects, including the Iraq War, the Asian tsunami, political and celebrity interviews, travel and the environment. He is currently writing a book about British butterflies.

▼ CURATED BY ENDYMION

Endymion: from Moscow to London Endymion gave the very first public concert at Kings Place just 11 months ago, and we’re delighted to be invited back for this year’s Kings Place Festival. Earlier this year we celebrated our 30th anniversary at Kings Place with 11 concerts, 27 world premieres by British composers, 7 of which were by local A-level students, a CD recording for NMC, a gala concert by primary schools from Tower Hamlets and a Composing for all workshop for the local community, all in the space of just four days. At no other London institution would it be possible for us to do such ambitious projects, so we’re pleased to be building an exciting presence at Kings Place. Endymion was formed in 1979 by friends who played together in the National Youth Orchestra, and since then we have built up a world-class reputation for mixed chamber music. Today we’re presenting a small sample from this goldmine of repertoire, featuring five of our founder members: Mark, Stephen, Michael, Jane and Krysia, and joined by viola player, Robin Ireland. Today’s concerts take us on a journey from Moscow to London. Our first concert starts in Russia, with two joyous trios by Stravinsky and Khachaturian, both taking influences from elsewhere: ragtime and jazz in Stravinsky’s case and Armenian folk melodies in Khachaturian’s case. There is also the premiere of a new piece by our Artistic Director, Philip Venables. The second concert, Dark Reflections, is more contemplative, with Debussy’s Violin Sonata, in which he moves away from French impressionism towards a German musical tradition, as exemplified by Brahms’ trio for clarinet, cello and piano. The final concert returns to some joyous, melodious music from Central Europe: Martinu’s Madrigals and Dohnányi’s Sextet – an exuberant kaleidoscope of emotions, from brooding romanticism to the flamboyant, exhilarating finale. www.endymion.org.uk

Venables, Stravinsky & Khachaturian Hall One 2.15pm Friday 4 September

ENDYMION ENSEMBLE Mark van de Wiel clarinet Stephen Stirling horn Michael Dussek piano Krysia Osostowicz violin Robin Ireland viola Jane Salmon cello Philip Venables New work (world premiere) Aram Khachaturian Trio in G minor for clarinet, violin and piano Andante, con dolore con espressione; Allegro; Andante Stravinsky The Soldier’s Tale Suite for violin, clarinet and piano The soldier’s march; The soldier’s violin; Little concert; Tango – Waltz – Ragtime; The Devil’s dance Philip Venables is currently writing an opera based on Boris Vian’s play, The Empire Builders, a Cold War farce about the consequences of giving free reign to paranoia. The plot concerns a family fleeing from an unknown loud noise in the house they share with a faceless zombie, whom they mindlessly torture. Eventually the father, having killed his wife and daughter through fear, is left facing the zombie, and throws himself out the window. This piece is an instrumental version of this final scene. Venables’ simple, slow, sad, and occasionally dramatic score paints the father reminiscing and slowly going mad. Aram Khachaturian was born in 1903 in Armenia but spent his career in Moscow. As this 1932 trio illustrates, the Soviet authorities’ demands for upbeat, folk-inspired works didn’t present the same artistic problems for him as they did for Shostakovich. His harmonic language is ambiguous, exotic, but far from dissonant, and his style is naturally suffused with Armenian folk music. After the lyrical Andante con dolore, the violin and clarinet seemingly at odds with the piano, the pace quickens for the folk dance-inspired Allegro. The finale’s variations on Uzbekistani folk songs opens with a particularly atmospheric lilting clarinet solo. After a reflective central section, and a final build of momentum, the music winds down until, once more, the clarinet is alone. Rhythm and folk were just as important to Stravinsky, despite his very different musical language. He once claimed, ‘Rhythm and motion, not the element of feeling, are the foundations of musical art’. The Soldier’s Tale is based on a Russian folk story about a soldier’s losing battle to regain the violin – his soul – tricked off him by the Devil. This boisterous, snappy suite is a rhythmic banquet of Russian folk inflections, classic dance, and American ragtime. Tonality flits between major and minor, and the intricacies of the linear writing are accentuated by the instruments’ contrasting sonorities.

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Dark reflections: Brahms & Debussy Hall One 3.30pm Friday 4 September ENDYMION ENSEMBLE

Central Europe: Dohnányi & Martinu˚ Hall One 4.45pm Friday 4 September ENDYMION ENSEMBLE

Mark van de Wiel clarinet Stephen Stirling horn Michael Dussek piano Krysia Osostowicz violin Robin Ireland viola Jane Salmon cello

Debussy Sonata for violin and piano, L.140 Allegro vivo; Intermède – Fantasque et léger; Finale – Très animé Brahms Trio in A minor, Op.114, for clarinet, cello and piano Allegro; Adagio; Andantino grazioso; Allegro

Martinu˚ Three Madrigals (‘Duo No 1’), H.313, for violin and viola Poco Allegro; Poco Andante; Allegro Dohnányi Sextet in C major, Op.37, for piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet and horn Allegro Appassionato; Intermezzo: Adagio; Allegro con sentimento – Poco Adagio, Andante tranquillo; Finale: Allegro vivace, giocoso

Death, or at least life’s end, is the linking thread between these two works. Debussy wrote his rhapsodic sonata in 1917, when desperately ill with the cancer that would kill him the following year. The contemporary critic Vallas thought it borrowed too much from previous works, complaining, ‘the whole work betrays fatigue and effort. There is an impotent vehemence about it’. True, it evokes the soaring flute lines of La Flute de Pan, and the Spanish colour of Iberia, but there is so much more. Despite the beautiful Allegro Vivo’s impassioned climaxes, and the Finale’s vibrant, virtuosic finish, this profound work has an all-pervasive feeling of uncertainty, with continuous windings and unwindings of tension, as if impending sorrow has been momentarily averted. Debussy himself warned, ‘Don’t trust any piece that appears to hover in flight from heaven – it could have been brooded in the dark depths of a sick man’s brain! For instance, the finale of my sonata: the simple play on a thought that twists itself like a snake biting its own tail...’. In 1890, seven years before his death, Brahms announced his retirement. However, in 1891 he heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld play and was inspired to write four pieces for him, including this trio. Autumnal in tone, it feels like the work of a composer at the height of his powers, anticipating life’s end. The anxious, sparselytextured Allegro sets a reflective and sober tone, punctuated with bursts of Romantic drama. Its anxiety is partly assuaged by the gentle warmth of the major-tonality Adagio, although even here there are minor-keyed clouds on the horizon. The also major-keyed Andantino grazioso supplants the usual third-movement Scherzo with a Viennese waltz, and an Austrian Ländler (forerunner of the Waltz) occupies the trio section. Then, its back to the minor for a final virtuosic Allegro, complete with Gypsy-ish three-against-four rhythms. Classic Brahms.

After the sombre themes earlier this afternoon, this final concert of Central European music ends on a light note. Czechoslovakian Bohuslav Martinu˚ wrote his two duos for violin and viola in 1947 for the American viola player Lillian Fuchs and her violinist brother, Joseph Fuchs, after hearing them perform Mozart’s two violin and viola duos. The siblings would later programme his duets alongside Mozart’s. This first duo, Three Madrigals, lives up to its name with its linear textures, intricately interweaving parts, and its hints of Renniassance dance, although in overall mood it perhaps has more in common with Mozart’s light-hearted divertimenti. The sprightly Poco Allegro plays with major and minor tonalities, alternating joyful playfulness with a suspense that tips into sadness for the Poco Andante. However, this eventually dissipates, and a chordal climax shimmering with warmth heralds a final winding down to peaceful repose, before the excitement of the final merry Allegro. Ernö Dohnányi was born in 1877 in Hungary, and wrote this Sextet in 1935. Dohnányi’s early compositions won high praise from Brahms and, despite this work being written almost forty years after the great German’s death, and his tinkering with traditional harmony (the opening Allegro only truly relaxes into C major towards its end), it is well and truly Romantic in feel. It’s also more than a little Brahmsian, particularly in the opening Allegro’s turbulent theme and in its virtuosic piano writing. Dohnányi, like Brahms, was an accomplished pianist. The Intermezzo introduces tranquillity and pared-down textures, but also later a forceful, unsettling central march that reappears towards the end. The Allegro con sentimento contains more elaborate piano writing and a scherzo-like presto variation. The movement flows seamlessly into the vibrant, humorous finale, where an offbeat main theme tries to sabotage a sentimental waltz that keeps heroically endeavouring to break through. Charlotte Gardner

▼ CURATED BY MUSIKÉ

Musiké and the Merchant Quartet Musiké’s professorial team for 2009, under the leadership of Jean-Bernard Pommier, brings together leading exponents of French and Russian performance schools. Jean Bernard himself celebrates his 65th birthday shortly before these concerts and has been at the heart of international pianism and conducting for almost 50 years. We welcome too the Merchant Quartet, four players from the BBC Symphony Orchestra who form our young artists for 2009. Together with the professors, they offer you a rich series of programmes for two days of this festival. We are delighted to celebrate the first birthday of Kings Place, the tenth of Musiké and the sixty-fifth of Jean Bernard Pommier with this group of concerts. These two days provide you with two piano quintets (Dvorˇák and Elgar) and two piano quartets (Mozart and Fauré), both featuring Pommier with the professorial team and the Merchant Quartet. The Quartet also works with Maurice Bourgue to bring you the Dorati Nocturne and Capriccio, while Bourgue is joined by Musiké strings for the Britten Phantasy Quartet. The large group of strings enables us to present the (incomplete) Borodin Sextet, the professors alone provide the Schubert Notturno and Pommier partners Olga Martinova for the Strauss Violin Sonata, Maurice Bourgue for the Poulenc Oboe Sonata and both Bruno Pasquier and Boris Baraz for a selection of Bruch pieces for viola, cello and piano. Enjoy! D J Whittington, Chairman of Musiké

Borodin and Mozart Hall Two 2.30pm Friday 4 September

MERCHANT QUARTET Amyn Merchant violin Ruth Schulten violin Philip Hall viola Michael Atkinson cello MUSIKÉ Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Maurice Bourgue oboe Olga Martinova violin Bruno Pasquier viola Boris Baraz cello Borodin String Sextet in D minor Allegro; Andante Mozart Piano Quartet in E-flat major K.493 Hoffmeister Allegro; Larghetto; Allegretto

‘Respectable people don’t write music or make love as a career’, Alexander Borodin once proclaimed. He called himself a ‘Sunday composer’ who wrote music in his spare time from his job as a chemistry professor at the Medical-Surgical Academy at St Petersburg. Most of Borodin’s earliest compositions were chamber music and his String Sextet dates from 1860, before the music for which he is best known. Borodin was studying in Heidelberg where he attended concerts and played chamber music with his musician friends. It was for them that Borodin wrote his Sextet in D minor, referring to it as ‘having been written to please the Germans’, and Borodin’s idiomatic writing for string instruments is evidence of his experience playing chamber music as a cellist. Only two movements of the Sextet have survived, the opening Allegro and a theme and variations, although sketches do exist for an introduction to a finale in D major. The Piano Quartet in E-flat was the first work Mozart wrote after he had completed his opera The Marriage of Figaro. Combining piano with three stringed instruments was something of an experiment in a still unproven and by no means popular musical genre, and the idea appears to have originated with the music publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister in Vienna, who commissioned three piano quartets from Mozart in 1785. However, the first quartet, in G minor, did not sell well because of the demands it made on the players, so Hoffmeister withdrew from the project and unfortunately Mozart never wrote the projected third quartet. The geniality of the E-flat Quartet comes in stark contrast to its dark, turbulent predecessor. The outer movements have something of the expansiveness of Mozart’s recent E-flat Piano Concerto, K482, whilst the Larghetto is music of an almost rapturous intensity.

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Poulenc, Bruch, Britten

Schubert and Fauré

Hall Two 3.45pm Friday 4 September

Hall Two 5.00pm Friday 4 September Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Maurice Bourgue oboe Olga Martinova violin Bruno Pasquier viola Boris Baraz cello

Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Maurice Bourgue oboe Bruno Pasquier viola Boris Baraz cello Poulenc Sonata for Oboe & Piano Elégie (Paisiblement) Scherzo (Très animé) Déploration (Très calme) Bruch 8 Pieces Op.83 for viola, cello & piano Britten Phantasy Quartet, Op.2 for oboe, violin, viola and cello Andante alla marcia – Allegro giusto – Più lento – A tempo commodo e rubato – Con fuoco – Molto più lento – Sempre più agitato – Molto più presto –Tempo primo ‘I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations…but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords,’ Francis Poulenc wrote. ‘You can be a great musician and still not be an innovator…you can be influenced by Prokofiev…I have myself in certain little areas’. Poulenc dedicated his Sonata for Oboe and Piano to the memory of Prokofiev, whom he admired as composer and pianist, dubbing him ‘the Russian Liszt’. After the opening Elégie comes a Scherzo whose brilliant, toccatalike piano writing harks back to Prokofiev’s style, and the slower middle section alludes to the finale of Prokofiev’s Flute Sonata. The valedictory Déploration (Lament) is the last music Poulenc completed. Max Bruch was a contemporary of Brahms but lived for nearly a quarter of a century longer, remaining unchanged by the seismic changes in the development of music as he steadfastly continued to compose in what might be called his conservative mid-Romantic style. Bruch’s son Max Felix was a fine clarinettist and Bruch wrote two of his late works for him, his Double Concerto for clarinet and viola and his Eight Trio Pieces for clarinet, viola and piano. Bruch’s Pieces were published in 1910 and, ever the practical composer, he provided versions for alternative instruments. Benjamin Britten wrote his Phantasy Quartet when he was still attending the Royal College of Music for the competition devised by the English musicologist Walter Wilson Cobbett. This was for chamber music works which combined the sixteenth and seventeenth century fantasy with cyclic, one movement form. In the event Britten’s work did not win, but its performances and radio broadcast by its eventual dedicatee, the oboist Leon Goossens, and members of the International String Quartet made the nineteen-year-old’s name and work internationally known.

Schubert Notturno in E-flat D.897 Adagio Fauré Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor Op.13 Allegro molto moderato; Scherzo (Allegro vivo); Adagio; Allegro molto Schubert possibly intended the Notturno in E-flat to be the slow movement of his Trio in B-flat, D898, the first of the two piano trios he wrote during the last year of his life. This Adagio, with its ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere and contrasting, turbulent central section seems to anticipate the slow movement of the great string quintet that Schubert composed a few months later. The title was not Schubert’s own, but one given to the piece by the Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli when it appeared after Schubert’s death. The first of Fauré’s two piano quartets was one of his earliest instrumental masterpieces. He was choirmaster at the Madeleine church in Paris and was introduced into fashionable Parisian society by his teacher, Camille Saint-Saëns. At one of the soirées of the contralto Pauline Viardot, Fauré met and fell in love with her daughter, Marianne. They eventually became engaged but Marianne terminated their relationship shortly afterwards, and it was during this traumatic period that Fauré composed his First Piano Quartet. This is music of striking originality, which is proclaimed right from the bold, powerful opening. The second movement is a sunny, skipping scherzo, followed by an Adagio whose tragic mood has led to speculation that it may have been a reflection of Fauré’s state of mind about his abortive engagement. The finale returns to the broad, energetic conception of the first movement. Fauré himself was the pianist in the Quartet’s first performance, in Paris, in 1880, and he recalled being shocked by the careless and casual attitude of the string players. At a rehearsal Fauré made some observations about tempi and dynamics only for the cellist to interrupt him with ‘My dear fellow, we’re in a hurry, it’s all we can do to get the notes right: we haven’t got time to worry about nuances!’ Jeremy Hayes

▼ CURATED BY EDWARD WICKHAM

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Meet the Composer: The Composer’s Craft

8 1 7 16 1 Robert Saxton, Christopher Fox and Simon Bainbridge in conversation with Edward Wickham Three leading British composers discuss how they work. How do they structure their music? What inspires them and what influences their compositional choices? These interviews aim to give a glimpse ‘under the bonnet’ of contemporary music – providing an insight into the minds and methods of three figures who are not only known for their exceptional music, but are also highly respected teachers of composition. The conversations are aimed at anyone with an interest in the world of contemporary classical music, and will address some of its issues, problems and challenges.

Robert Saxton St Pancras Room 2.45pm Friday 4 September Robert Saxton was born in London in 1953 and studied with Benjamin Britten, Elisabeth Lutyens, Robin Holloway, Robert Sherlaw Johnson and Luciano Berio. He has taught composition at Bristol University, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music, and is now Professor of Composition at Oxford University. Robert is currently working on a radio opera for BBC Radio 3, The Wandering Jew.

Christopher Fox St Pancras Room 4.00pm Friday 4 September Born in York in 1955, Christopher Fox studied composition with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Orton at Liverpool, Southampton and York universities. Since 2006 he has been Research Professor in Music at Brunel University. Hailed by Andy Hamilton in The Wire as ‘a tantalising figure in British music’, Christopher’s work regularly extends beyond the conventional boundaries of the concert hall – his most recent work was premiered in the turbine works of Siemens, Berlin.

Simon Bainbridge St Pancras Room 5.15pm Friday 4 September Simon Bainbridge was born in London in 1952. He studied composition with John Lambert at the Royal College of Music and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. He is Head of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Bainbridge’s most significant project is Music Space Reflection, a work for 24 players and live electronics inspired by, and designed to be performed inside, buildings designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. Jointly commissioned by the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the piece has also been performed at the Danish Jewish Museum, Copenhagen and as a concert work at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

▼ CURATED BY ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: Essence of Enlightenment The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s four concerts this evening provide a fantastic showcase not just for the Orchestra’s renowned versatility and technical prowess but also for its breadth of repertoire and for each part of the Orchestra. Each concert casts the spotlight on a different section: wind, strings and brass. And each concert has also been curated and programmed by the musicians themselves, for one of the defining features of the OAE is that it is self-governed, run by its players with no single music director. In these four concerts the familiar and less-familiar rub shoulders with each other, making each 45-minute concert a tantalising musical pot-pourri. Rediscover old favourites from Mozart, Handel, Corelli and Purcell and discover lost gems from composers such as Kuhlau, Viviani and Ewald. All delivered with the OAE’s trademark panache, style and verve, and giving you the ‘essence of Enlightenment’.

19 Classical Wind Hall One 7.00pm Friday 4 September Lisa Beznosiuk flute Neil McLaren flute/piccolo Rachel Beckett flute/recorder Georgia Browne flute Soile Stratkauskas flute/piccolo Hotteterre Echoes for solo flute Jr Jacob van Eyck Engels Nachtegaeltje (English Nightingale) from Der Fluyten Lust-hof Boismortier Concerto in E minor for five flutes Mozart Two arias: ‘Ach ich Fühls’ from The Magic Flute & 'Vivat Bacchus' from The Abduction from the Seraglio Kuhlau Grand Quartet in E minor Curated by Lisa Beznosiuk, OAE Principal Flute

It must rank as one of the most dissembling letters in the history of music. ‘Moreover you know’, writes Mozart to his father, ‘that I become quite powerless when I am obliged to write for an instrument I cannot bear’. The instrument was the flute, yet Mozart’s entire output involving it protests otherwise. And in his last German opera (like Die Entführung, a hybrid of words and music), the flute is the conduit for magic of all sorts! During the 18th century the flute was king, and in France near-contemporaries Hotteterre and Boismortier were not slow to tap into a lucrative domestic market. Hotteterre brought to his music a little southern sun acquired during an apprenticeship in Italy which earned him the nickname ‘Le Romain’; but back at the French Court, as a member of the Grand Ecurie and subsequently ‘flute player of the chamber’, he published appealing collections of suites and sonatas as well as the highly influential ‘Art of Preluding’, bold in its wide-ranging choice of keys. Boismortier, meanwhile, in Six Concertos for five flutes published as Op.16 in 1727, brought the wildly popular Vivaldian concerto model to the French scene – adopting not simply the three movement design (the E minor, like the last of the set, unusually placing the slow movement first), but even embracing Italian terms for the designation of the movements, all the while never surrendering an ounce of rococo Gallic charm. Later French events – the Napoleonic military draft – would catapult Friedrich Kuhlau from Germany to a new life as concert pianist and composer in Copenhagen. Like Boismortier he was an enthusiastic purveyor of flute music – acquiring the soubriquet ‘the Beethoven of the flute’. And from an earlier age, lending perspective, the Dutch recorderplaying carilloneur Jacob van Eyck is heard weaving variations (with appropriate ornithological gurglings) on a 1630s tune enthusiastically plundered by 17th century composers.

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

The Band of Oboes

Baroque Strings

Hall One 8.15pm Friday 4 September

Hall One 9.30pm Friday 4 September

Richard Earle oboe James Eastaway oboe Gail Hennesy oboe Mark Radcliffe oboe Cherry Forbes tenor oboe Zoe Shevlin bassoon Andrew Watts bassoon

Alison Bury violin Matthew Truscott violin Elizabeth Kenny theorbo

Music from C17th and C18th Oboe Bands to include: Purcell Suite from The Fairy Queen Lully Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Handel Dances from Rodrigo Curated by Richard Earle, OAE Sub-principal Oboe With the reopening of the theatres following the Restoration, and with a Francophile monarch determined to be seen cutting an up-to-theminute dash, Purcell might have hoped – particularly post Dido and Aeneas – that his theatrical flair could find its finest employment in that Lullyan speciality: opera. The English, however, wanted spoken dialogue, not too much singing, a seasoning of dance, and above all, spectacle. In a word, ‘semi-opera’ – and Purcell duly obliged four times and rather handsomely. Indeed Dryden (who collaborated on King Arthur) considered Purcell ‘so great a genius that he has nothing to fear but an ignorant, ill-judging audience’. King Arthur’s successor was The Fairy Queen on which no expense was spared for the first run of 1692. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been spatchcocked to provide the framework for an extravaganza, and each Act now included an elaborate masque affording every opportunity for vivid characterisation and exoticism. Exoticism, too, invades the crowning glory of Lully’s fertile comédie-ballet partnership with Molière: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Born in Florence Lully was no more French than Marie Antoinette, yet his music came to embody both the musical ideals and ambitions of his employer Louis XIV, and to shape the tone and accent of French music for a generation and more. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme deftly satirises the pretensions of the middle classes, culminating in a dénouement revelling in the current vogue for all delights Turkish. Lully might have turned his back (in more senses than one) on Italy. For Handel, though, the country was his musical ‘finishing school’. And to Lully’s native city fell the premiere of Handel’s first all-Italian opera, Rodrigo, an Iberian tale of royal infidelity sternly subtitled ‘self-conquest is the greater victory’! The journey to the London stage triumphs had begun – and with it, perhaps, the fulfillment of a Purcellian dream.

Purcell Sonata No.6 from Ten sonatas (1697) John Playford Paul’s Steeple Fontana Sonata No.7 for two violins and bass Balzar John Come Kisse Me Nowe Viviani Passacaglia for lute Corelli Sonata Op.3 No.8 for two violins and bass Curated by Alison Bury, OAE Leader ‘It’s wonderful to observe what a skratching of Corelli there is everywhere’ observed Roger North as the 18th century hit its stride. ‘Nothing will relish but Corelli’. Resident in the Eternal City, Corelli felt inclined to disregard ‘when in Rome’, and shunned vocal music in favour of instrumental; yet the risk paid off. By 1800 the Op.5 Violin Sonatas had notched up 42 editions – eclipsing by the merest whisker the Op.1 Trio Sonatas. Corelli wasn’t just an enormously successful composer; he was bordering on brand name status. The 4 sets of trio sonatas published at roughly 4 yearly intervals between 1681 and 1694 effectively established the Roman predilection for 2 violins and continuo as the reference point. And whether ‘learned’ or ‘entertaining’, their aim (declared Roger North), was ‘a true pantomime or resemblance of humanity and all its states’. The ‘humanity’ was not lost on Henry Purcell. In the preface to his first book of Sonatas of 1683 he admitted to ‘a just imitation of the most famed Italian masters’. The second set published by Playford in 1697 was, in part, a posthumous ‘mopping up’ operation and as cunningly-worked-out, yet plangently harmonised and melodically supple as the first set – music suffused with ‘Italian which is the best master’, Purcell elsewhere confided, ‘and a little of the French air to give somewhat more gayety and fashion’. Born in Brescia, active in Rome, then Padua, Giovanni Battista Fontana wrote some of the earliest sonatas in whose slipstream Corelli took wing, his collection of 18 Sonatas published in Venice posthumously in 1641. Paul’s Steeple is to be found in the 1685 Playford ‘Division Violin’ containing 26 tunes subjected to increasingly complicated variations. Another set of ‘divisions’ is Thomas Balzar’s set on an English air already given a good keyboard going-over by Byrd, while Viviani’s lute ‘divisions’ over a recurring ground bass remind us that there is an alternative to ‘skratching’: plucking! Paul Riley

▼ CURATED BY ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Romantic Brass Hall One 10.45pm Friday 4 September David Blackadder trumpet Phillip Bainbridge trumpet Andrew Clark horn/trumpet Susan Addison trombone/trumpet Anthony George tuba/ophicleide

A selection of late Romantic brass quintets from Bellon, Maurer, Ewald and Fanfares by Diabelli Curated by Andrew Clark, OAE Principal Horn The nineteenth century saw many changes to brass instruments, not the least of which were the invention of the tuba and its precursor the ophicleide. Before these inventions the bass voice of the brass section was the trombone, but these new wider-tubed instruments gave a rounder sound that complimented the other instruments in providing the harmonic bass, and offered more variety of tone to the ensemble. Initially this satisfied the demand of orchestral composers for a fuller, bigger sound, but a natural evolution was for small ensemble music to be written combining these more chromatically capable and freshly designed brasses: valved horns, cornets and trumpets, valved trombones, euphoniums and tubas. Nowadays this has become formalised into the Brass Quintet or ten-piece ensemble, but this was far from the case a hundred years ago and more. This evening’s entertainment will begin with a rousing Fanfare by Diabelli for four trumpets, then we will sample the evolving small brass ensemble through music composed specially for the medium by nineteenth century writers (Ewald, Bellon and Maurer) and music arranged from popular music of the era such as Rossini’s William Tell Overture and the Whirlwind Polka by Jules Levy. Andrew Clark

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

▼ CURATED BY ALISTAIR ANDERSON

Traditional Folk Innovators Tradition and innovation may seem, at first glance, to be almost polar opposites – but folk music has always been in a state of constant change. The dynamic between the musical ideas of different generations, interactions between individuals across musical communities and the influence of other cultures and genres all play a role in a living tradition. These concerts present four leading performers who have a profound love and understanding of their own folk heritage. They have each spent many years engrossed in the styles, songs and melodies of their heroes from previous generations. But, like those who have gone before, they have made their own creative contributions and in doing so have inspired others to take up the music. Some of the changes generated within a tradition may be so subtle as to be hardly visible while others may be dramatic and obvious. However, which of those new ideas will have a lasting effect will only become apparent after many years – as musicians, singers and dancers gradually, and almost subconsciously, pick those styles and new perspectives that are fit for purpose. They can then add them to the pooled repertoires that underpin their musical form – dropping by the wayside some ideas that may have excited for a while but didn’t stand the test of time. Whether any of this evening of stunning music will one day be regarded as part of the folk tradition or perhaps part of some as yet unnamed genre, only time will tell. But whichever it is, we hope you enjoy these concerts of music that is both from the very heart of the tradition and from its cutting edge.

Chris Wood

Alistair Anderson

Hall Two 7.15pm Friday 4 September

Hall Two 8.30pm Friday 4 September

Winner of Best Album and Singer of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2009, Chris Wood is a singer, guitarist and fiddler, a masterful songwriter, and a key figure in English music. Chris’s uncompromising, gently intelligent songs – which weave traditional forms with his own contemporary parables – reveal his passion for the unofficial history of the English-speaking people. In a warm, dark voice with sparse, minimalist accompaniment, he is an intimate storyteller – applying such nuance and gravitas to every phrase that you are imperceptibly lured into his world. It has been said that his music shares the same timeless quality as Richard Thompson at his best.

Alistair Anderson is the leading exponent of the English concertina and without doubt one of the all-time greats of Northumbrian music. Alistair weaves a special sort of magic – combining old tunes from Northumberland and the Borders with his own compositions, which grow out of his love for these older traditions. Special guests Kathryn Tickell and violinist Peter Cropper will join him for two short, recently composed, pieces.

‘I think Chris Wood is an incredible artist… he combines stories and music in such an original and completely melodic way.’  – Laurie Anderson

‘His appeal as a musician lies not only in his remarkable handling of the English concertina and Northumbrian pipes. It is also a result of his total involvement in his music, his absolute sincerity, which succeeds in reaching a far wider audience than his classification as a folk musician would suggest.’ The Stage ‘The pleasure comes chiefly from the excellence of the playing; that particular delight which comes from anything superbly done. The concertina emerges as a flexible and sensitive instrument; in the hands of a player of Anderson’s quality it is amazing what it can achieve.’ The Guardian

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Kathryn Tickell and Peter Tickell

Brian Finnegan

Hall Two 9.45pm Friday 4 September

Hall Two 11.00pm Friday 4 September

A composer and performer whose work is deeply connected to the landscape and people of Northumbria, Kathryn Tickell is the world’s finest exponent of the Northumbrian pipes. Since her first album release in 1986 she has toured extensively throughout the UK and abroad. As well as composing her own music she has collaborated with artists as diverse as Sting, Andy Sheppard, The Chieftains, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. As founder of the Young Musicians Fund and artistic director of Folkestra, Kathryn has a real commitment to emerging artists in the northeast of England. In January 2009 she was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for her work as musician, composer and educator. Kathryn Tickell is a passionate voice for Northumbrian traditional music and continues to bring her wealth of creativity to audiences worldwide. Kathryn is joined by her brother Peter Tickell, an exceptional young fiddle player who first started appearing on stage with his big sister while still at primary school. Appointed at the age of 17 as leader of the Young Sinfonia, Peter is equally adept at the classical violin and the traditional fiddle.

Brian Finnegan is without doubt one of the most exciting flute players Ireland has ever produced, with a stunning technique on whistle and flute that has made him an inspiration for a new generation of young players in the increasingly global Irish music scene. He is best known for his leading role in the brilliant, but sadly recently-disbanded, Flook – winner of the Best Group award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2006. Brian has toured the world as a soloist and in various ensembles and has recently returned from an extensive tour of Russia with Boris Grebenshikov – a leading singer and lyricist dubbed the ‘Poet Laureate of Russia’. Some of his collaborations with Eastern European musicians have played a role in his own exciting compositions. Brian will be accompanied by guitarist Ian Stephenson, who delighted audiences at last year’s Kings Place Festival as part of the band 422.

▼ CURATED BY SPITZ

Spitz Festival of Blues

The annual Spitz Festival of Blues was one of the jewels in the crown of The Spitz – the much-loved venue in the old Spitalfields Market that was ‘developed’ out of existence two years ago. It is appropriate then that the Spitz Festival of Blues should be reborn, albeit on a smaller scale, in an exciting new music venue – Kings Place. Far from being an anachronistic celebration of the past, these four concerts celebrate where the blues is at in the 21st century, featuring some of today’s finest blues innovators – John Crampton, Tom Rodwell, Parkbench and Sister Mary and the Choirboys. In their different ways, they each use the blues as a template – developing and inverting traditional forms to their own ends. Blues, bluegrass, R&B, gospel, honky-tonk – whatever you call it, this is thrilling, vital, dynamic music.

27 John Crampton – Foot Stompin’ Blues St Pancras Room 7.30pm Friday 4 September The four corners of the blues are kicked into action with the one-man-band steam train that is John Crampton and his Foot Stompin’ Blues. Though he has played in a variety of R&B, skiffle, gospel and Latin-influenced bands, it’s as a solo performer that John’s talents have really shone. His masterly playing on National steel guitar, harmonica and footboard – together with his raw, muscular vocal style – builds into a powerhouse of rhythm, strings and beats. Though deeply influenced by such greats as Howlin’ Wolf, John Hammond and Bukka White, John has adapted and evolved traditional blues to fit his singular musical voice, mainly performing his own compositions. Be prepared for a truly spiritual experience. ‘Stunning blues voice… he blew me away!’ Blues in Britain ‘A one man powerhouse… superb’ Digital Blues

28 Tom Rodwell St Pancras Room 8.45pm Friday 4 September At once thought-provoking and immediate, singer/ guitarist Tom Rodwell presents an unruly hybrid of blues, gospel and calypso. With lyrics drawing on the allegories and subtexts of slave-era spirituals, and danceable, freshly-improvised rhythms, Rodwell’s performances are rarely standard fare. As well as performing in ruined Swiss castles at dawn and in ramshackle Sheffield boozers during opening hours, Rodwell recently joined LA’s leading ukulele-playing fortune teller, Madame Pamita, for a series of concerts featuring recording sessions on vintage wax cylinders. For this performance, Tom is joined by percussionist dynamo Damian Horner-Pausma, who makes the unconventional seem natural, playing found objects, tabla, tambourine and a Brazilian hand drum called the pandeiro. ‘By turns wild, angry, hypnotic and sensual, it’s as uncompromising as it is funky and some of the best live music I’ve seen.’ Blues in London

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

29 Sister Mary and the Choirboys St Pancras Room 10.00pm Friday 4 September Deeply soulful Atlantic blues meets 21st century London in this performance from one of London’s newest and best blues bands. After completing her training at Trinity College of Music, singer Emine Pirhasan made links with some of London’s foremost up-and-coming musicians, including composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas. Sharing a passion for Bessie Smith and Ray Charles – and after many a late-night jamming to the sounds of the honky-tonk piano and the cajón – the two decided to form a band exclusively dedicated to blues and R&B. After two years of gigging on the London scene, the five-piece band has built up a considerable following for its contemporary, edgy sound. Songs that sound like earthy classics are, in fact, original material written by Pirhasan and Thomas, with wildly intricate lyrics and an overwhelmingly instinctive blues voice from the band’s indomitable singer.

30 Parkbench Plays the Blues St Pancras Room 11.15pm Friday 4 September Parkbench is the brainchild of San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalist Martin Wissenberg, who likes to ignite things with a loose and lyrical approach. The band is made up of four distinctly different musicians who bring their individual styles to an array of finely evolved, yet groovy and immediate, torch songs. Performing live, the band conjures up the true Boogie Chillun John Lee Hooker ethos. Joining songwriter and bandleader Wissenberg are: drummer Jim Kimberley, who lays down a steady, yet unpredictable, and sometimes punishing, folk-blues-reggae tempo; guitarist Franck Alba, bringing tonal flair and ethereal psyche-ridden ambience; and bass player and guitarist David Villanueva keeping it all fresh and improvised in spirit, tone and feel. Parkbench is ultimate proof that the blues is living and real. ‘... timelessly stylish blues... ‘ Time Out

SATURDAY 5

▼ CURATED BY MUSIKÉ

Musiké and the Merchant Quartet Musiké’s professorial team for 2009, under the leadership of Jean-Bernard Pommier, brings together leading exponents of French and Russian performance schools. Jean Bernard himself celebrates his 65th birthday shortly before these concerts and has been at the heart of international pianism and conducting for almost 50 years. We welcome too the Merchant Quartet, four players from the BBC Symphony Orchestra who form our young artists for 2009. Together with the professors, they offer you a rich series of programmes for two days of the festival. We are delighted to celebrate the first birthday of Kings Place, the tenth of Musiké and the sixty-fifth of Jean Bernard Pommier with this group of concerts. These two days provide you with two piano quintets (Dvorˇák and Elgar) and two piano quartets (Mozart and Fauré), both featuring Pommier with the professorial team and the Merchant Quartet. The Quartet also works with Maurice Bourgue to bring you the Dorati Nocturne and Capriccio, while Bourgue is joined by Musiké strings for the Britten Phantasy Quartet. The large group of strings enables us to present the (incomplete) Borodin Sextet, the professors alone provide the Schubert Notturno and Pommier partners Olga Martinova for the Strauss Violin Sonata, Maurice Bourgue for the Poulenc Oboe Sonata and both Bruno Pasquier and Boris Baraz for a selection of Bruch pieces for Viola, Cello and piano. Enjoy! D J Whittington, Chairman of Musiké

31 Dvorˇák Hall One 9.30am Saturday 5 September MERCHANT QUARTET Amyn Merchant violin Ruth Schulten violin Philip Hall viola Michael Atkinson cello Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Dvorˇák Piano Quintet in A major Op.81 Allegro, ma non tanto; Dumka: Andante con moto; Scherzo: Furiant – Molto vivace; Finale: Allegro It was while he was revising his early Piano Quintet that Dvorˇák decided to write a completely new one, in the same key. The early quintet was eventually published after Dvorˇák’s death as his Op.5, and it has had some notable champions too, but the quintet which has become so deservedly popular should therefore really be known as his Second Piano Quintet. Dvorˇák wrote it in just over six weeks, during the autumn of 1887, at his small country cottage at Vysoká, between his seventh and eighth symphonies and just before he began his opera The Jacobin. The open-hearted expression and richness of the melodic material of the Quintet have ensured its enduring appeal, and its contrasts of mood and subtlety of invention place it among Dvorˇák’s finest works. In the first movement these contrasts are effected mainly by changes in harmonic rhythm, not in changes of tempo – which is all too often the case in performances! The second movement is based on the Dumka, a favourite of Dvorˇák and the most prominent folk-like element in his music. The brooding, sombre lament heard at the start contrasts with the livelier interludes as the opening melody develops into a wild dance. The scherzo has elements of the Furiant and the Valcík, a Czech waltz, and Dvorˇák maintains the finale’s seemingly inexorable momentum by leaving its main theme open-ended.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Doráti and Strauss

Elgar

Hall One 10.45am Saturday 5 September

Hall One 12 noon Saturday 5 September Amyn Merchant violin Ruth Schulten violin Philip Hall viola Michael Atkinson cello

Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Maurice Bourgue oboe Olga Martinova violin Amyn Merchant violin Ruth Schulten violin Philip Hall viola Michael Atkinson cello Doráti Nocturne & Capriccio for Oboe & String Quartet Strauss Sonata in E-flat Op.18 for Violin & Piano Allegro, ma non troppo; Improvisation: Andante cantabile; Finale: Andante – Allegro The Hungarian-born Antal Doráti is best remembered as a conductor – he held posts in London with the BBC Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras, and had an extensive discography. However, Doráti regarded himself as a conducting composer not a composing conductor and he remained active for most of his life, writing a substantial oeuvre. It was Doráti’s teacher and mentor Zoltán Kodály who suggested that Doráti’s projected four-movement oboe quintet be compressed into the Notturno and Capriccio. It dates from 1926 and is one of Doráti’s earliest works to have survived, the two short movements written, as Doráti himself said, in a style which is ‘recognisably contemporary but not afraid of melody’. Doráti observed that ‘the thematic contents of the two movements are related by contrast (the motivic germ of the second being the exact opposite of the first) and the Nocturne is a development of the slow introduction of the rhapsody form into a symphonic movement, complete within itself. I might point out that even the Capriccio is a nocturne of sorts and that the entire small work remains throughout within the nature moods of light and twilight’. ‘I am the lion of the hour. Everyone in raptures’, Richard Strauss wrote home in 1887. He was disillusioned by the routine work involved in his job as third conductor at the Munich Court Opera and was using the time to consolidate his reputation as both composer and conductor by touring Germany and Italy, giving performances of his own music. Just before he began the series of symphonic poems which made him so famous, beginning with Macbeth and Don Juan, Strauss wrote his Violin Sonata, his own instrument, as it were, since he was an accomplished violinist as well as pianist – he was the pianist at the Sonata’s first Munich performance. He had already composed a violin concerto, but this Sonata was Strauss’ last piece of chamber music before he abandoned the genre forever. The panache of the very opening of the work proclaims the unmistakable musical voice of its composer.

Jean-Bernard Pommier piano Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor Op.84 Moderato – Allegro; Adagio; Andante – Allegro ‘It is strange music I think and I like it – but – it’s ghostly stuff’, Elgar wrote to Ernest Newman about the first movement of his Piano Quintet. Between 1917 and 1919 Elgar and his wife retreated from London as often as possible to Brinkwells, a cottage near Fittleworth in West Sussex, and the atmosphere of the countryside there was the inspiration for much of Elgar’s Violin Sonata, String Quartet and Piano Quintet. In September 1918, on the day Elgar finished the Sonata he immediately began work on the Quintet. Alice Elgar wrote in her diary that it had a ‘Wonderful weird beginning…evidently reminiscence of sinister trees and impression of Flexham Park. Sad, dispossessed trees and their dance and unsullied regret for their evil fate.’ Elgar was fascinated by a copse of dead, misshapen trees just above their cottage. His friend WH Reed described them as having ‘gnarled and twisted branches, bare of bark and leaves, a ghastly sight in the evening when the branches seem to be beckoning.’ These trees had also inspired a local legend that they were the ghostly forms of Spanish monks who had been struck dead while carrying out some impious rites. Elgar was an enthusiast for supernatural stories – he particularly enjoyed MR James – and this Sussex legend inspired the ominous, mysterious music of the opening Moderato, an introduction whose themes permeate the whole Quintet. Jeremy Hayes

▼ CURATED BY INTERNATIONAL GUITAR FOUNDATION

International Guitar Foundation

The IGF (International Guitar Foundation) once again brings a thrilling series of concerts to Kings Place Festival, showcasing the unique versatility of the world’s most popular instrument – the guitar. The guitar – along with its siblings the oud and lute – is the world’s oldest solo instrument with notated music. It is found in every musical culture, it excels in all musical styles – from heavy metal and rock to jazz, bluegrass, flamenco and classical – and transcends barriers of age and culture. Celebrating the guitar’s rich heritage, multicultural origins and exciting future, the IGF here presents an eclectic preview of its forthcoming festival at Kings Place – London Guitar Festival in the Fall, from 26 October to 2 November. The concert series features a centenary celebration of guitar legend Django Reinhardt with John Wheatcroft’s Ensemble Futur’, the Arabic-Andalusian sounds of virtuoso oud player Soufian Saihi, and young Cuban classical guitarist Ahmed Dickinson Cardenas playing the music of one of his homeland’s great masters, Ñico Rojas. Prepare to be surprised and delighted by a truly international mix of scintillating sounds.

34 Soufian Saihi and Ruben Perez Hall Two 9.45am Saturday 5 September Moroccan oud player Soufian Saihi – joined by guest percussionist Ruben Perez on cajón – invites the audience to a spiritual and meditative start to the day. Soufian has been playing the oud since he was a young teenager. At 17 he left Morocco to study in France where he played Arabic-Andalusian music with bands featuring Algerian and French jazz musicians. He came to the UK in 2004 where he joined Moroccan band Gnawa UK. As well as performing as a soloist and accompanist, he sings a repertoire of spiritual Gnawa music, and plays oud and percussion with eclectic, London-based band Fernando’s Kitchen.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

35 Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas Hall Two 11.00am Saturday 5 September The refined playing of Cuban guitarist Ahmed Dickinson Cárdenas evokes the sounds of bohemian, pre-revolution Havana and pays homage to Ñico Rojas, one of the greats of Cuba’s filin (‘feeling’) movement, who died last year. José Antonio (Ñico) Rojas Beoto was born in Havana in 1921. A civil engineer, guitarist and composer, he brought about a revival in Cuban popular song in the 1940s and 50s. His music mixes Cuban rhythms with harmonies and melodies influenced by North American jazz. He later recorded for the Cuban label EGREM and his songs were performed and recorded by numerous Cuban artists, including Omara Portuondo, Elena Burke, Frank Emilio Flynn and Pablo Milanés. However, Rojas couldn’t write music and many of his works would have been lost if it had not been for his young protégé, Ahmed Dickinson, who transcribed many of Rojas’ compositions, working closely with Rojas and his son Jesús. In October 2008 Ahmed released his internationally-acclaimed debut album, Ahmed Dickinson Plays Ñico Rojas, on Cubafilin Records.

36 Ensemble Futur’ Hall Two 12.15pm Saturday 5 September Guitarist John Wheatcroft’s quintet Ensemble Futur’ seamlessly integrates the sounds and approach of modern jazz with the timeless Franco-American swing of the legendary Django Reinhardt. It is a sound that is vital, forward-thinking and highly original, while retaining its roots in the traditions of the genre. With a line-up also featuring Andy Mackenzie and Jim Clark on rhythm guitars, James Oscroft on percussion and Andrew McKinney on electric and acoustic basses, this promises to be a scintillating musical experience.

â&#x2013;ź CURATED BY ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

OAE Kids Shake, Rattle and Roll

If your kids love music then these family events will be music to their ears! Hosted by principal bassoonist Andrew Watts and other players from the world-renowned Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, these three workshops for young children and their parents are an exciting, involving and creative way to explore the joy of music making. The OAE is a player-led ensemble, performing on period instruments to bring out the very best of classical music as it was intended to be heard. The Orchestraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s uniquely versatile and pioneering spirit encourages a warmth and involvement that shines through its extensive work with children. Come along and enjoy the fun!

Roll St Pancras Room 10.00am Saturday 5 September Join your child for games, songs and lots of fun at this workshop suitable for under-twos and their parents.

Shake St Pancras Room 11.15am Saturday 5 September The musical fun and games continue at this workshop for two and three-year-olds and their parents.

Rattle St Pancras Room 12.30pm Saturday 5 September Join your child for this fun and involving music workshop suitable for four and five-year-olds and their parents.

▼ CURATED BY ALAMIRE

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Henry’s Music & Legacy

2 4 1 40 4 FREE

On 24 June 1509 Henry Tudor was crowned the eighth English king of that name. His early reign was seen by all as a new Golden Age, full of opulence, splendour, majesty and harmony. While Henry’s reputation is today largely that of the tyrant, in the first 20 years of his reign he was perhaps one of the greatest royal patrons of the musical arts in all of Europe. Here we explore the other Henry: the musician, scholar, and happy prince. We also discover how his Reformation changed the shape of music in England forever, from the Protestant Reformation under his son Edward to the great artistic ‘settlement’ under his daughter Elizabeth I.

FREE

Alamire – Henry’s Music & Legacy Atrium 12.30pm / 1.30pm / 2.30pm Saturday 5 September Clare Wilkinson mezzo-soprano Nicholas Mulroy tenor Christopher Watson tenor Timothy Scott Whiteley baritone Robert Macdonald bass David Skinner Director In our first recital Henry’s own compositions are interspersed with movements of the Missa Sine nomine by John Taverner (d. 1545), the one composer under Henry VIII who seemed to foreshadow religious events in his later music. Also featured is the motet Nil majus superi vident written for Henry VIII as a diplomatic gift from the City of Florence in c.1526. Henry’s Reformation set the scene for the doctrinal reformation under Edward VI: music in English, which, as suggested by Thomas Cranmer himself, should be set ‘distinctly and devoutly’. The return to Catholicism under Mary I meant also a return to Latin composition. Composers such as Thomas Tallis excelled in text-setting and led the English to their musical Renaissance. The second recital features music contained in the most important musical source from Edward’s reign, the so-called Wanley Partbooks, now in the British Library. Here we will discover how composers adapted to the new English prayer book issued in 1549: some adapted music from earlier models (a technique known as contrafactum), others deployed simple harmonizations of liturgical texts, while others, led by Thomas Tallis, forged a new form of composition: the English Anthem. Henry’s Legacy is also celebrated in the first collection of Latin motets published in England: Cantiones Sacrae (London, 1575). While music printing had flourished on the Continent since Petrucci’s first imprint of 1501, no comparable effort had yet been achieved by the English. Tallis and Byrd’s Cantiones Sacrae, which features in our third recital, was both a patriotic venture and a celebration of English musical composition; a declaration to those European masters that the English were indeed a force to be reckoned with.

▼ CURATED BY CLASSICAL OPERA COMPANY

Classical Opera Company – Classical Love Songs

The Classical Opera Company presents three recitals devoted to the songs of the three greatest composers of the Classical period – Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. These programmes, devised by the company’s artistic director Ian Page, explore the multifaceted theme of love, ranging from youthful innocence and playfulness to tragic grief and despair, and even incorporating a lament on the death of a pet poodle. Three outstanding young singers are joined by the exciting young fortepianist Gary Cooper in a rare opportunity to hear this delightful repertoire accompanied on the instrument for which it was originally written. These songs were originally written to be performed at social gatherings in people’s homes, and as such they are ideally suited to the intimacy of Kings Place. They are less familiar than the composers’ works in other genres, but are full of beguiling lyricism, dramatic dynamism and impish humour. As such, these eclectic and entertaining programmes provide an unusual and intriguing cross section of the careers of these three great masters.

43 Mozart’s Burnt Love Letters Hall One 2.15pm Saturday 5 September Sophie Bevan soprano Sigríður Ósk Kristjánsdóttir mezzo-soprano Thomas Hobbs tenor Gary Cooper piano ‘An die Freude’; ‘Oiseaux, si tous les ans’; ‘Dans un bois solitaire’; ‘Die Verschweigung’; ‘Der Zauberer’; ‘Die betrogene Welt’; ‘Die Alte’; ‘Das Veilchen’; ‘Das Lied der Trennung’; ‘Als Luise die Briefe’; ‘Abendempfindung an Laura’; ‘An Chloe’; ‘Auf die feierliche Johannisloge’

Mozart’s songs formed a relatively minor part of his output, and were originally composed solely for private performance, but they contain music of superb craft and elegance, and the best of them are masterpieces in the genre. He wrote some thirty songs in total, ranging across the whole of his compositional career from 1768, when he was a twelve-year-old upstart, to the beginning of his final year, 1791, although the majority of them date from his mature years as a freelance musician in Vienna. This programme of Mozart Lieder is framed by two early Masonic songs extolling the virtues of brotherly love and friendship. Also featured are the comic ‘Die Alte’, in which the singer is instructed to sing ‘a little through the nose’ as she portrays a whingeing old woman, the two French songs which Mozart wrote in Mannheim for his beloved Aloysia Weber, and the intensely dramatic ‘Als Luise die Briefe’, in which the distraught young woman of the title burns the letters of her unfaithful lover. The endearing ‘Das Veilchen’ is Mozart’s only setting of Goethe, while ‘Abendempfindung an Laura’ is an exquisitely tender and heartfelt contemplation of life’s transcience.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Haydn’s Piercing Eyes

Beethoven’s Kiss

Hall One 3.30pm Saturday 5 September

Hall One 4.45pm Saturday 5 September

Sophie Bevan soprano Sigríður Ósk Kristjánsdóttir mezzo soprano Thomas Hobbs tenor Gary Cooper piano

‘The Mermaid’s Song’; ‘Trost unglücklicher Liebe’; ‘Piercing Eyes’; ‘Eine sehr gewöhnliche Geschichte’; ‘A Pastoral Song’; ‘She Never Told Her Love’; ‘Fidelity’; Cantata – ‘Arianna a Naxos’

‘Adelaide’; ‘La tiranna’; ‘In questa tomba oscura’; ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’; ‘Die Liebe’; ‘Elegie auf den Tod eines Pudels’; ‘Der Kuss’; ‘Ich liebe dich, so wie du mich’; ‘An die ferne Geliebte’

This selection of Haydn songs encompasses three languages, including two songs in his native German and the magnificent cantata depicting Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos. This cantata, which alternates recitative and aria in four dynamic sections, was one of Haydn’s most popular works during his lifetime, and he intended to orchestrate the colourful keyboard accompaniment. The rest of the programme comprises a selection of some of the English canzonettas which Haydn wrote in London between 1794 and 1795. These songs were the inspiration of Haydn’s friend Anne Hunter, whose floridly sentimental poems provided the texts for the enticing ‘Mermaid’s Song’ (‘Now the dancing sunbeams play’), the tormented and fiery ‘Fidelity’ (‘While hollow burst the rushing winds’) and the popular ‘Pastoral Song’ (‘My mother bids me bind my hair’). Also featured is the setting of the anonymous poem ‘Why asks my fair one if I love?’ and Haydn’s only setting of Shakespeare, ‘She Never Told Her Love’. This setting of Viola’s words from Act Two of Twelfth Night combines masterly simplicity and spaciousness with moments of astonishing power, none more telling than the anguished discord on the words ‘smiling at grief’.

Unlike Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven composed most of his song output during his early years, although he actually wrote considerably more songs than his two illustrious predecessors. Despite this, his songs look forward to the songs of Schubert, and this is noticeable not only in their formal variety but also in the increased importance and independence of the piano accompaniments. The Classical Opera Company’s programme of Beethoven love songs begins with the exquisitely lyrical ‘Adelaide’, which was a particular favourite of the composer, and also includes ‘La Tiranna’, his only original setting of English, and the mischievously witty ‘Der Kuss’. A love of a different kind is expressed in the little known ‘Elegy on the Death of a Poodle’, and the recital concludes with a performance of the first ever song cycle, ‘An die ferne Geliebte’. The six individual songs which make up this cycle are linked by piano interludes, with the final song returning to the same key as the opening, and the cyclic unity is affirmed when the theme of the opening song returns at the end of this great work.

▼ CURATED BY JOHN METCALFE

John Metcalfe presents... Music for the Afterlight

46 Brought together by curator John Metcalfe – whose own singular musical path has taken him from post-punk pioneers The Durutti Column to a series of acclaimed solo albums – all the artists in this programme of concerts write beautifully crafted, melodic and emotionally articulate music. As John Metcalfe notes: ‘I knew Ted Barnes’ and Clayhill’s music well already and was introduced to The Leisure Society by Clayhill’s bass player Ali Friend. Having the three of them in one afternoon makes for an unmissable event.’

Ted Barnes Hall Two 2.30pm Saturday 5 September Written during time off from working with Beth Orton – whom he had collaborated with on the acclaimed Trailer Park and Central Reservation albums – Ted Barnes released his first solo album, Short Scenes, in 2002. The album was greeted with widespread critical acclaim, and featured Beth Orton and Gavin Clark, with instrumentals written by Ted and producer Oisin Lunny. After this release Ted continued to work with Beth on her Daybreaker album and toured extensively. In 2003 he formed the band Clayhill with longtime colleague Ali Friend and singer Gavin Clark. The band has released three albums and a mini album as well as working on soundtracks for film director Shane Meadows. In 2005 Ted released a new solo album, Underbelly, on Sketchbook Records. Made up entirely of instrumentals, it also garnered critical acclaim, as did his seven-piece band’s live performances. In July 2008 his new album Portal Nou was released on Ted’s own label, Mornington Records. Mixed by Sebastian Rogers, it features instrumental numbers as well as collaborations with Francoiz Breut, Dan Michaelson, Beth Orton, Gavin Clark, Kathryn Williams. Ted has also finished producing Gavin Clark’s debut solo album and featured on the Shane Meadows's film Somers Town.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

The Leisure Society

Clayhill

Hall Two 3.45pm Saturday 5 September

Hall Two 5.00pm Saturday 5 September

The story of The Leisure Society began in Burtonupon-Trent when Nick Hemming picked up a guitar and formed a band with Shane Meadows, Paddy Considine and Rich Eaton. After a year, Shane and Paddy were drawn towards careers in film, leaving Nick to pursue a life of making music. After serving time with Burton band The Telescopes, Nick contributed scores to some of Shane’s movies – including A Room For Romeo Brass and Dead Man’s Shoes – under a new moniker: The Leisure Society. Then in 2005 he was asked to collaborate with fellow Burtonian Christian Hardy, prompting a move to south London where he bunked up in Christian’s postage stamp bedroom. Nick started shyly presenting his compositions to his new flatmate, picking up a ukulele or guitar and pouring out songs that were wistful, romantic and drenched in longing. Hardy was suitably transfixed. Thus The Leisure Society was reborn, a new band in which Christian tinkled the ivories and sung all the notes Nick couldn’t reach. The band’s debut album, The Sleeper, was released to great acclaim in March 2009. The first single from the album, The Last of the Melting Snow, was released in December 2008. It was voted Record of the Week on Radcliffe and Maconie’s BBC Radio 2 show and has been nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically & Lyrically. And that’s the story. The Leisure Society is Hemming with Hardy, a band from Burton reborn in a London bed. Together they strive for a time of relaxation through automation, for a moment when they can hold their table tennis bats aloft and salute modernity.

Formed in 2002, Clayhill are a band born from three very different musical backgrounds. Ali Friend (bassist, keyboards) and Ted Barnes (guitar, keyboards) were both working on Beth Orton’s Daybreaker album when they first chose Gavin Clark as the lead singer for their, as yet unformed, band. Originally, Ali was a member of experimental electronica band Red Snapper, Gavin was the frontman of the band Sunhouse and Ted was concentrating on his solo album Short Scenes. Ted and Ali were collaborating on the music for Shane Meadows’ Once Upon a Time in the Midlands when they discovered that Gavin was one of Shane’s oldest friends. ‘Ted and I had wanted to try working together on something’, says Ali. ‘Once I heard Gav’s voice I wanted him to be the next member of the band we decided to form.’ Since then Clayhill have gone on to record four very successful albums; Cuban Green, Small Circle, Mine at Last and Clayhill (an acoustic album reflecting a three piece tour). Clayhill have always strived for moments of experimentation and cliffhanger emotion. They have toured extensively as a headline act and also as opening band for Kathryn Williams and notably Beth Orton, both in the UK and US. The cinematic and emotional quality of the music has over the years also cemented a strong collaborative relationship with Shane Meadows. Clayhill contributed to the soundtrack for Dead Man's Shoes while Shane made Northern Soul – a short film produced especially for the band. More recently, the band’s version of the Smiths Please, please, please... featured in the final emotion-packed scene of Meadows’ This is England. Most recently Clayhill have been writing and recording the next album, so this is a rare and exclusive opportunity to catch these fellas beating out their warm, tussled and melancholic groove in a live environment.

▼ CURATED BY POET IN THE CITY

Poet in the City: Voice Recognition Who are the best young poets writing today? Which new poets are most likely to become the defining voices of their generation? Bloodaxe Books, one of the UK’s leading poetry publishers, recently asked two young editors, James Byrne and Clare Pollard, to answer these questions. The result is Voice Recognition, a fabulous new anthology introducing 21 of the most exciting young poets of the 21st century. Voice Recognition showcases the work of a talented new wave of poets from Britain and Ireland who are just now starting to make their mark. None has yet published a first book of poems. All are likely to produce distinctively different debut collections in the next few years. Influenced by poetry from across the world, and unafraid to take risks, all these poets are committed to extending and remaking the traditions of poetry in a fast-changing new millennium. Their poems show a lively range of styles and subjects – sometimes sexy, sometimes dark, but consistently brimming with vitality. The future of poetry begins here. Poet in the City is delighted to present twelve of these poets in a series of three New Audiences events to mark the launch of this ground-breaking new publication. Come and experience for yourself some of the very best contemporary poetry, brought to you live as part of Kings Place Festival! Presented by the New Audiences committee of Poet in the City.

Words Converge Poet in the City is also proud to present Words Converge, a spectacular art installation in the Kings Place atrium. The installation has been created by artists Rebecca and Andreas Pohancenik from Text Gallery (www.textgallery.info) and is generously supported by the British Council as part of the Creative Collaboration arts initiative for southeast Europe. It features work from the Voice Recognition poets, as well as poets from Romania, Greece, Georgia and Israel. The installation is the first of several in the Words Converge series. Poet in the City is working with its local partners to exhibit the installation in all of the other four countries involved in this exciting international project. In the meantime we hope that you enjoy this fantastic celebration of poetry and spoken word at Kings Place.

49 Myth and Family St Pancras Room 2.45pm Saturday 5 September Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Miriam Gamble, Jonathan Morley and Sandeep Parmar What are the stories we tell about ourselves? These four poets explore the narratives that shape our sense of the world – from folk tale to family legend. Expect a host of updated myths for the 21st century, with new takes on figures from Medusa to Our Lady of Gateshead. Toby Martinez de las Rivas has won an Eric Gregory award and the Andrew Waterhouse award. His Faber New Poets pamphlet is published in October 2009. Miriam Gamble’s pamphlet This Man’s Town was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first full collection of poetry, The Squirrels are Dead, will be published by Bloodaxe in 2010. Jonathan Morley is the founder and editor of Heaventree Press. A pamphlet of his poems, Backra Man, was published by Perdika Press in 2008. Sandeep Parmar is currently co-editing the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees for Carcanet. She is the reviews editor for The Wolf magazine.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Tales of the City

Modern Love

St Pancras Room 4.00pm Saturday 5 September

St Pancras Room 5.15pm Saturday 5 September

Heather Phillipson, Amy Blakemore, Siddhartha Bose and James Womack

Joe Dunthorne, Sophie Robinson, Emily Berry and Sarah Jackson

Bombay, New York, Madrid, London – take a tour around some if the world’s great cities with a quartet of poets who thrive on urban energy, whether writing about City traders or the thrum of India. Heather Phillipson is an artist and poet. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and will have a Faber New Poets pamphlet published in October 2009. Amy Blakemore was born in 1991 and lives in London. She has twice been a Foyle Young Poet of the Year. Siddhartha Bose was born in Calcutta. The Times called him ‘one of the ten rising stars of British poetry’. James Womack has lived in Russia, Iceland and Spain. He currently lives in Madrid where he runs publishing house Nevsky Prospects.

James Fenton has called the love poem the ‘little black cocktail dress’ that every collection of poetry should contain. But how to avoid the clichés? These poets take the age-old subject of love in surprising new directions, from a history of corsetry to a guide to ‘future dating’. Joe Dunthorne’s debut novel Submarine won the Curtis Brown Prize in 2006. His Faber New Poets pamphlet will be published in 2010. Sophie Robinson’s work has been included in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, and her pamphlet, a, was published by Les Figues Press in 2009. Emily Berry has won an Eric Gregory Award, and her pamphlet collection Stingray Fevers was published by tall-lighthouse in 2008. Sarah Jackson’s debut pamphlet Milk, published by Pighog Press in 2008, was nominated for a Michael Marks Award. She is poetry editor of The New Writer magazine.

▼ CURATED BY SPITZ

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER & SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Spitz presents... The Spitz – situated in the old Spitalfields Market – was one of London’s best-loved music venues, building a well-deserved reputation for excellence over its 11-year history. Although the venue is no more – after it was forced to close due to the development of the property market – The Spitz lives on, presenting concerts in a variety of spaces across London. Offering four concerts over two days, these free events in the Kings Place atrium give a small taste of The Spitz’s brilliantly eclectic and imaginative music programming.

FREE

Maya Jobarteh Trio

Téa Hodžic Trio

Atrium 5.15pm Saturday 5 September

Atrium 5.15pm Sunday 6 September

The Maya Jobarteh Trio performs African classical music – a blend of traditional and contemporary compositions featuring kora (the west African harp-lute), guitar and udu. Sona Maya Jobarteh is a singer, songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist and a member of one of the five principal families of the west-African griot tradition, which dates back to the 13th century. Cousin to the renowned kora maestro Toumani Diabaté, Sona has made her mark as the first virtuoso female kora player from this family. Sona leads her trio, teaming up with composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Tunde Jegede, and Bangladeshi dancer and poet Shahanara Begum, who seamlessly blends movement and music to captivate and intrigue audiences.

Téa Hodžic’s startling and evocative voice has enchanted audiences from Womad to Sarajevo. Exploring the songs of Téa’s homeland, the former Yugoslavia, the Téa Hodžic Trio features longtime collaborators Oliver Wilson-Dickson on violin (Szapora, Mabon, The Devil’s Violin) and Luke Carver Goss on accordion (Szapora and The Ian McMillan Orchestra). Moving to the UK in 1989, Téa was involved in creating and performing music for When Lightning Breaks at London’s Southwark Playhouse. She has also performed for Bath Mozartfest’s acclaimed community opera The Mozart Bug, and most recently for BBC Radio 3’s World On Your Street with Eliza Carthy. Téa has also toured the UK and Europe with Balkan supergroup Szapora.

Spitz Jazz Collective

‘Her voice haunted me for the rest of the day’ The Times

FREE

Atrium 6.45pm Saturday 5 September The Spitz Jazz Collective performed at The Spitz for eleven years and became the longest-standing jazz residency in London. Featuring musicians who played a major part in the venue’s final concert, these two events are a must-see for all fans of sharp, soulful jazz. The Saturday session showcases a trio led by Jay Phelps on trumpet, together with double bass and guitar. One of the UK’s hottest up-and-coming jazz musicians, Jay played a key role in Courtney Pine’s Afropeans project for the Jazz Warriors.

Spitz Jazz Collective

88 FREE

Atrium 6.45pm Sunday 6 September Sunday’s session features another trio, this time led by singer Michael Mwenso. As the Evening Standard recently noted: ‘Michael Mwenso is best known as trombonist in Abram Wilson’s big band. He’s also a nifty dancer and extremely snappy dresser but few realise he can sing… he’s inspired.’

▼ CURATED BY DAVID MURPHY

Indian Legends: an evening with Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan

Brothers Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan have enthralled audiences and critics worldwide for their performances on the sarod – a wooden stringed instrument that makes one of the most sublime sounds in Indian classical music. The sons of sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan, they are the youngest members of a musical dynasty that spans seven unbroken generations, they now bring their bold playing and technical mastery to Kings Place. Initiated into the art of sarod playing at a very tender age, Amaan Ali Khan began performing alongside his father at the age of eight and has garnered international acclaim for his technical mastery of the sarod. In October 2002 he received the Provogue Society Young Achievers Award, and in 2004 took part in the relay for the Athens Olympics. In 2005 Amaan composed the music American Daylight, a film by Academy Award-winning director Rodger Christian. Today, Amaan is considered as one of the finest young sarod players. Reviewing his latest solo album, Songlines magazine called Amaan a ‘worthy heir to his father’s crown’. Like his older brother, Ayaan Ali Khan stepped into the world of sarod music with a confidence, clarity and technical mastery learnt on his father’s knee. Following a live debut at the age of eight, Ayaan has been performing concerts worldwide ever since. In 2000, Ayaan joined his father at the Dalai Lama’s Sacred Music Festival inauguration. 2005 saw Ayaan’s venture into electronic music with the release of his album Reincarnation. Together, Amaan and Ayaan have been regular performers at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Esplanade in Singapore, the Chicago Symphony Center, Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in the USA, and the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican here in the UK. They have also appeared at the Summer Arts Festival in Seattle, the Edinburgh International Festival, the World Beat Festival in Brisbane and Womad festivals in New Plymouth and Adelaide. They performed with cellist Matthew Barley and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in 2002. In 2005 they collaborated with The Derek Trucks Band at the Savannah Music Festival in Georgia. Later that year they featured with their father on the much-acclaimed album Moksha. In 2006 UK appearances included a collaboration with Evelyn Glennie at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. In 2007 the release of their lounge/electronica album Truth showcased the brothers’ willingness to explore far beyond the boundaries of the Indian classical music tradition.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Ayaan Ali Khan – Raga Lalita-Gauri

Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan – Raga Bageshwari

Hall One 7.00pm Saturday 5 September

Hall One 9.30pm Saturday 5 September

Raga Lalita-Gauri is named after the manifestations of the Divine Mother or Shakti. Filled with pathos and depth, it is one of the most beautiful sunset ragas. The composition is set to a 14-beat time cycle called ada chautaal followed by a fast composition set to a 16-beat time cycle called teentaal.

The literal meaning of Bageshwari is ‘goddess Saraswati’, the goddess of knowledge and learning. Bageshwari is a night raag, immensely appealing in its strength and romanticism. The concert commences with a slow build up called alaap. This is followed by a composition set to a 15-beat time cycle called pancham sawari. Interestingly, the structure of the composition is the same as that of the time cycle.

55 Amaan Ali Khan – Raga Desh Hall One 8.15pm Saturday 5 September Raga Desh is a very romantic raga that is also associated with the rainy season. Giving a feeling of joy and happiness, it is one of the most traditional ragas of Indian classical music. Amaan also plays two compositions by his grandfather, Haafiz Ali Khan.

Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan – Raag Kirwani with Raga Mala Hall One 10.45pm Saturday 5 September To Western ears, Raag Kirwani is simply the harmonic minor scale. Amaan and Ayaan play a composition set to a 16-beat teentaal time cycle. The term Raga Mala literally means a garland of ragas so here they present a medley of ragas of different scales and time. The concert commences with a fast Kirwani piece, again set to a 16-beat time cycle.

▼ CURATED BY LONDON SINFONIETTA

London Sinfonietta: Classical and Experimental

Come and discover an exciting new world of sound with the London Sinfonietta. These four short concerts are an example of the extraordinary breadth of music featured in the ensemble’s 2009-10 season, and give audiences a chance to experience the variety of contemporary classical music, ranging from classics of the 20thcentury to the latest cutting-edge experimental works. The dream-like world of the opening concert (Debussy & Takemitsu, 7.15pm), begins with two gently meditative pieces for flute, viola and harp. Be entertained with the short portrait of Luciano Berio (Sequenzas & Duets, 8.30pm): this is the composer as you’ve never heard him before part-clown, part-musician and part-comedian. Feel energised with a vibrant showcase of music from two of today’s leading composers (Matthews & Fujikura, 9.45pm); Dai Fujikura describes his work Eternal Escape as ‘like watching a Scorsese movie’. Be part of musical history with the world premiere of his new work for solo double bass, Es, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, then enjoy Colin Matthews’ enigmatic work for cello and piano. To finish, take part in a late-night experiment with sound with composers Richard Barrett and Larry Goves (Concert 61, 11.00pm), who explore the boundaries of a different sonic world. To help audiences interpret the music, composer and educator Fraser Trainer presents each concert with a short talk about the composers and their work. Richard Barrett, Dai Fujikura, Larry Goves and Colin Matthews join the London Sinfonietta for the live performances of their music (Concerts 60 & 61), working alongside the extraordinary musicians who make up the ensemble. Come along and meet the composers, hear them discuss their work and ask them questions about their music.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Debussy and Takemitsu Hall Two 7.15pm Saturday 5 September Michael Cox flute Helen Tunstall harp Toru Takemitsu And then I knew ‘twas Wind Claude Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp Pastoral; Interlude; Finale Despite the two works in this programme being separated by over 75 years, and coming from two very different cultural backgrounds, these dream-like pieces for flute, viola and harp from Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) and French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) share several parallels. The composers are two of the 20th century’s most evocative masters of sound, and these works generate the same luminous colours and sense of an otherworldly atmosphere. Toru Takemitsu was largely self-taught and incorporated a wide range of influences in his work, ranging from jazz to traditional Japanese music. However, his harmonic language was largely derived from Debussy. Takemitsu referred to the French composer as his ‘great mentor’, writing that ‘Debussy’s greatest contribution was his unique orchestration which emphasises colour, light and shadow.’ And then I knew ‘twas Wind (1992) is consciously modelled on Debussy’s Sonata, and directly quotes some of Debussy’s earlier melodies. Like much of Takemitsu’s music, the work creates a smooth, hypnotic flow of sound and silence. Debussy’s Sonata was written in 1915. Already suffering from cancer, Debussy was depressed by the war and mourning the death of his mother – all factors that stunted his flow of creativity. However, by June that year he wrote to his publisher that, ‘I have a few ideas at the moment, and, although they are not worth making a fuss about, I should like to cultivate them.’ His idea was to write a set of six sonatas for various chamber combinations, which included the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. This three-movement work begins with an ethereal Pastoral, which opens with a floating flute and viola melody. The gentle dancelike Interlude recalls dance rhythms from the Baroque period, while the closing Finale is more animated, featuring wild pizzicato passages on the viola and rapid falling arpeggios on the flute. Debussy himself seemed unsure about the work’s emotional effect, writing to a friend that, ‘[The music is] so terribly melancholy, that I can’t say whether one should laugh or cry. Perhaps both at the same time?’

Sequenzas and Duets Hall Two 8.30pm Saturday 5 September Mark van der Wiel clarinet Byron Fulcher trombone David Alberman violin Luciano Berio Sequenza V Luciano Berio Sequenza IX Luciano Berio Duetti (selection) A short portrait of Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003), one of the 20th century’s most important composers. Celebrated for his pioneering work using electronics, Berio is famous for his interest in serialism and his eclectic, experimental compositions. The Sequenzas, a collection of fourteen pieces written for different solo instruments, contain some of Berio’s best-known music and encapsulate his evolving musical development. The pieces were written throughout virtually the whole of his composing life; the first Sequenza, for flute, was written in1958, and the last, for cello, dates from 2002. In each work, Berio experiments with the technical limits of the different instruments and pushes the boundaries of sounds they can produce to the extreme, resulting in some strikingly vivid and colourful instrumental writing. The pieces also highlight the virtuosic and dramatic potential of musical performance, as seen and heard in Sequenza V. Written in 1966 for solo trombone, the piece requires the performer to assume the role of clown, musician and comedian. It was written as a tribute to Berio’s childhood neighbour Grock, ‘the last big clown’ whose musical blunders made him a well-known performer across the world. As a child, Berio was profoundly affected by one of Grock’s performances; ‘when I was 11 years-old, I had the chance to see [Grock] in performance and I realised it [his genius]. During that performance, just once, he suddenly stopped and, staring at the audience, he asked: ’Warum‘ (‘why’). I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, I wished I could do both of them’ said Berio. ‘Sequenza V is a tribute to that ‘Warum’ in English: why.’ A humorous, light-hearted work, the piece brims with musical tomfoolery, requiring the trombonist to mime, sing, blow and play – often simultaneously. Sequenza IX, for clarinet (1980), is a more serene work, in which the clarinet plays a gentle song-like melody, creating a rich, unfolding kaleidoscope of colour. The evening includes a selection from Berio’s Duetti for two violins.

▼ CURATED BY LONDON SINFONIETTA

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

60 Matthews and Fujikura

Barrett and Goves

Hall Two 9.45pm Saturday 5 September

Hall Two 11.00pm Saturday 5 September

Mark van der Wiel clarinet Oliver Coates cello Enno Senft double bass John Constable piano

Mark van der Wiel clarinet Oliver Coates cello

Dai Fujikura Es (world premiere of London Sinfonietta commission) Dai Fujikura Eternal Escape Dai Fujikura Rubicon Colin Matthews Three Enigmas A vibrant showcase of music from two of today’s leading composers. Japanese composer Dai Fujikura (b.1977) is one of the most exciting younger voices writing today. Since coming to the UK at the age of 15, he has studied with several composers including Edwin Roxburgh and George Benjamin, rapidly gaining international recognition with his innovative, colourful compositions. In 2003, he participated on the London Sinfonietta’s Blue Touch Paper scheme, working with Peter Eötvös. Eternal Escape (2001) is a short percussive work for solo cello. Wild and rhythmical, the score marking instructs the performer to ‘exaggerate the dynamics as much as possible’. The cello line is diverse, featuring short lyrical passages, exotic sliding phrases and insistent, jagged rhythms, often performed by the cellist knocking the bow against the instrument. Fujikura explains that ‘Eternal Escape is like watching a Scorsese movie. It should sound like (and be performed) with high energy throughout the piece with a lot of irregular rapid mood changes.’ Rubicon (2006) is simply described as ‘100 notes for solo clarinet’. A more calm and meditative work, the clarinet plays a short meandering melody exploring the instrument’s extremes of pitch and dynamic, before ending with a sudden outburst of flutter-tonguing. The programme also includes the world premiere of a new work for solo double bass, Es, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as part of the Sinfonietta Shorts series. Es explores ideas that Fujikura will extend into a larger double-bass concerto for Enno Senft and the London Sinfonietta for June 2010. English composer Colin Matthews (b.1946) has long been at the forefront of contemporary music. Despite the title of his Three Enigmas for cello and piano (1985), Matthews writes that, ‘To explain the title would, obviously, take away the enigma: but there is nothing particularly mysterious intended.’ The outer pieces are both strident and fast, featuring prolonged, angular passages where the cello and piano play in unison; and the central movement is perhaps the most ‘enigmatic’, with the cello performing, virtually solo, a reflective melody.

61 Larry Goves the terminus wreck Richard Barrett trace Richard Barrett CHARON This late-night performance celebrates some of contemporary music’s recent experiments in sound, with music from two British composers who explore the extremes of instrumental writing. One of the most uncompromising composers of his generation, Richard Barrett (b.1959) is known for his challenging and densely detailed compositions. In the late 1980s he became associated with the ‘New Complexity’ movement due to the intricate notation of his scores, many of which present an almost impenetrable challenge for the performer, featuring complex polyphony and splintering sounds, and requiring a formidable technique to perform. Barrett’s current career is divided between improvisation and composition, and his work covers everything from intimate chamber pieces to epic orchestral works and wild laptop improvisations. Since 1986, he has been performing as part of the electronic duo Furt, with Paul Obermayer, which The Guardian describes as ‘one of the most blisteringly energetic and experimental partnerships over the past 20 years’. This experimentalism extends to Barrett’s compositions, with his work often incorporating unusual instrumentation; his orchestral work NO: Resistance and Vision Part 1 (1999-2004) includes a part for six flowerpots, and tonight’s short, two-minute work trace (1994) is written for two diatonic musical boxes. CHARON (1994-1995) is a ten-minute work for solo bass clarinet, full of subtle and contrasting shades of pitch and timbre, ‘whose strict and (almost) undeviating progression might call to mind the mythical ferryman of the dead from whom the music takes its title,’ writes Barrett. Larry Goves (b.1980) teaches composition at the Royal Northern College of music, and is studying towards a PhD supervised by Michael Finnissy. He also founded, writes for and performs electronics with the experimental music group, the house of bedlam. The terminus wreck (2008) is a dramatic work for solo cello, recalling the sounds of an imposing creaking ship, through frenzied microtonal passages. A technically challenging piece to perform, the work contains an extraordinary double-stop chord spanning a six octave interval. Carenza Hugh-Jones

▼ CURATED BY RED ORANGE

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Red Orange presents... New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments You may have heard of gravikords, whirlies and pyrophones. Or about orbitones, spoon harps and bellowphones. Or even the long string instrument, the mouth bow, the stamenphone, the theremin… the list goes on and on. There are many pioneering inventors and performers of such instruments – enough to warrant a whole festival to themselves. Tonight’s four concerts are a small but interesting sample of this endlessly fascinating and stimulating world. The creating, bending and re-inventing of instruments is not a new idea – it has existed for many centuries. These days, it is frequently associated with, and influenced by, experimental music, sound art, sound design, installation art, found sounds, modified electronic toys, custom relay circuits and circuit bending. The artists featured here belong to the unofficial school of outrageously inventive designers and builders of new, unusual and rediscovered musical instruments – a school that, suitably, encompasses a diverse range of musical approaches. Experimental sound sculptor Max Eastley plays his own arc, a monochord made of wood and wire that is scraped, bent and flexed into an orbit of amplified effects. Victor Gama performs with his own acoustic ‘Pangeia Instrumentos’, bearing wonderful names like southern cross, vibrant rings, tonal matrix and spiralphone. Then there are Rafael Toral’s panoply of custom-built electronic devices, modified amplifiers, portable square wave oscillators and glove-controlled computer sinewaves. Finally we come to the found percussion and acoustic phenomena of Z’EV, one of the progenitors of the industrial movement. This is only the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it will stimulate your curiosity about this tremendously rich area of musical culture.

▼ CURATED BY RED ORANGE

62 Max Eastley St Pancras Room 7.30pm Saturday 5 September ‘[Max Eastley] represents a tradition of sound sculpture virtually unknown in this country, and his work touches on various important and under-researched areas of sound installations, motion, music and creative sound collages.’ Art Monthly Max Eastley is an artist whose work combines kinetic sound sculpture and music to produce a unique art form. Since the late 1960s, Max has been fascinated by the relationship of chance to music and art, and in environmental forces such as wind and water. He began to investigate this relationship in his work, using kinetic sound machines and the natural forces of wind, streams and the sea. As a consequence, his career opened out into new areas of creative and philosophical exploration. Max is a hugely important and innovative figure in the field of sound art, often working in collaboration with other artists from a range of disciplines. He has exhibited his sound installations internationally, and worked closely with a wide range of artists, musicians and filmmakers, including Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway, Evan Parker, Thomas Köner, Eddie Prévost and the Spaceheads. Exhibitions of his installations in 2000 included Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery in London and Sound as Media in Tokyo. In 2002 he composed the music for Plants and Ghosts by Siobhan Davies Dance. He collaborated with musician and writer David Toop to produce the critically acclaimed albums New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1975), Buried Dreams (1994) and Doll Creature (2004). Max is a long-standing supporter of the Cape Farewell project, which brings together leading artists, writers, scientists and educators for a series of expeditions to raise awareness of climate change. For his contribution to the 2006 exhibition The Ship: The Art of Climate Change, Max produced a sound-sculpture installation that incorporated found sound recorded during Cape Farewell expeditions.

63 Victor Gama St Pancras Room 8.45pm Saturday 5 September Victor Gama was born in Angola and currently lives in Portugal. He is a composer, performer, electronics engineer and designer of innovative musical instruments. Several of his music works have been recorded, including the album Pangeia Instrumentos on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records. Victor has performed and exhibited his instruments and sound installations throughout the world. He is part of the Berimbau-Ungu project with the legendary Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, as well as one third of The Folk Songs Trio together with William Parker and Guillermo E. Brown. He has recorded and performed live with celebrated sound artist Max Eastley and is presently collaborating with the Kronos Quartet and designing innovative interactive musical instruments for the National Museums of Scotland. In the early 1990s Victor initiated the Pangeia Instrumentos project, in which he uses form as a variable in the composition process. He has since developed the Golian Modes Theory in which the score has a three dimensional component. The golian modes are four musical modes derived from the ancient Kongo graphic writing system known as Bidimbu. In 2002 he initiated and produced the Odantalan project in Luanda, Angola, an artistic residency and conference with musicians, art historians and religious leaders from Angola, Portugal, Colombia, Cuba and Brazil. The project analyses the processes of resistance that Africans once used against cultural imposition and devises new strategies and methods of cultural generation. He also initiated the Tsikaya project, the first digital archive of traditional music in Angola.

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

64 Rafael Toral St Pancras Room 10.00pm Saturday 5 September Born in Lisbon, Rafael Toral has been performing live since 1984. Having attempted to study music, he realised that his path was one of exploration and discovery, to which ‘conventional music teaching was irrelevant’. He learned acoustics, electronics and music writing, having started to write music on paper after his former fascination with graphic scores. In 1994 the album Wave Field determined a shift in composing methods, taking sound itself as the basic matter for all music, thus rendering his work ‘unwriteable’. Considered by the Chicago Reader to be ‘one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade’, Rafael has been working on, among other things, the possibilities of ambient music and improvisation with higher levels of risk. Developing solo work since 1987 – weaving a unique blend of references such as ambient, rock, chance and improvisation – Rafael recorded several solo albums, two with MIMEO and two with No Noise Reduction. He has performed worldwide and has worked with artists such as Sei Miguel, Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, John Zorn, Thurston Moore, Dean Roberts, Christian Fennesz, Lee Ranaldo and Jim O’Rourke. In 1996 Rafael collaborated with Rhys Chatham as curator and coordinator for the 100 Guitarists project in Lisbon. In 1998 he collaborated with David Toop and an international creative team for an exhibition at Lisbon’s Expo ‘98, composing a piece for remote-controlled boat horns. In 1999 he was a guest on Sonic Youth’s allbum NYC Ghosts & Flowers. In 2000 he created, with Paulo Feliciano, the mixed-media installation Toyzone for the Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. In 2003 Rafael produced the first Anthology of Portuguese Electronic Music. Having produced video pieces since 1994, Rafael’s visual output has increased over the years, with installations usually featuring interactive and unpredictable elements, and often using processing of generative feedback systems.

65 Z’EV St Pancras Room 11.15pm Saturday 5 September Z’EV is a one-man percussion orchestra. Using a battery of industrial discards, Z’EV makes perhaps the only thoroughly literal heavy metal music on earth.’ Music Sound Output Z’EV – born Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles, 1951 – is an American text-sound artist and mystic who is perhaps best known for his work as a catacoustic (reflected sound) percussionist. Regarded as a pioneer of industrial music, Z’EV began recording in the late 1960s on a handful of ‘psych-out’ projects. By the late 1970s he had begun to explore the ‘spatial poetics’ of the polyrhythmic clamour he had established with his hand-built percussive instruments. His work with both text and sound has been influenced by the Middle Eastern mystical system best known as Kabbalah, as well as – but not limited to – African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian rhythms, musics and cultures. He has studied the Ewe music of Ghana, Balinese gamelan and Indian tala. Journalist Louis Morra has written that: ‘Z’EV is a consummate example of contemporary performance art, as well as modern composition and theatre… [he] realises many of modernist art’s ultimate goals: primitivism, improvisation, multi-media/conjunction of art forms, the artist as direct creator.’ Responding to the 1984 release of Z’EV’s Six Examples video, director Joe Rees commented: ‘Z’EV is one of the most unique and important artists of this century.’ In 2008, Colombian critic Edgar Mauricio Ramirez Diaz described him as: ‘Without a doubt one of the most influential persons in the whole post-industrial history of contemporary music.’ Miguel Santos

SUNDAY 6

▼ CURATED BY PETER CROPPER AND MARTIN ROSCOE

Major and Minor These programmes are about maximum contrast. This is what all composers that I have ever met are looking for, and maximum characterisation. We start with Schubert at his most condensed and Brahms at his most expansive. His first movement is about as long as the four movements of the Schubert put together. In the second programme Brahms is tender, warm and romantic and Schubert at his most dramatic. In the final programme the roles are reversed with Schubert at his most amiable and Brahms troubled and nervous. The Schubert Sonatinas have been rather neglected over the years, mainly because of their title, given by the publisher. Schubert himself called them sonatas. They are, however, gems full of drama, passion and, of course, wonderful melodies. Brahms inherited Beethoven’s love of chamber music, writing a huge body of pieces for many different combinations. More than half of these include the piano so that he himself could take part in performances. These three are among the greatest written for violin and piano and show Brahms at his most fluent. Peter Cropper

66 Schubert and Brahms Hall One 9.30am Sunday 6 September Peter Cropper violin Martin Roscoe piano Schubert Sonatina in G minor D 408 Allegro giusto; Andante; Menuetto; Allegro moderato Brahms Sonata in G major Op.78 Vivace, ma non troppo; Adagio – Più andante – Adagio; Allegro molto moderato – Più moderato ‘Today I composed for money for the first time,’ Schubert wrote in June 1816. It was a cantata to celebrate the nameday of a popular music-lover in Vienna and it led to the first mention of Schubert in the press. The drudgery of teaching at his father’s school was in contrast to Schubert’s compositional productivity, which in 1816 included nearly one hundred songs, two symphonies, a mass, an unfinished opera and numerous chamber works including the three violin sonatinas. Schubert referred to these works as sonatas but when they were published after his death they were called sonatinas. This title reflects the size of the works, which are intimately scaled heirs to the Mozart sonata tradition. ‘Come, rise to higher spheres!’ Brahms wrote in a copy of his Violin Sonata in G, quoting the Queen of Heaven from Goethe’s Faust. Brahms began this, the first of his three violin sonatas in the summer of 1878 after visiting his godson Felix in Palermo. Felix was the youngest and most musically-talented child of Robert and Clara Schumann, and when he contracted tuberculosis he was sent to Sicily as a desperate measure to try to improve his health. Felix was a violinist and Brahms told Clara that he had written the almost funereal Adagio of the sonata with Felix in mind, just before the young man died in his mid-twenties. The Finale is based one of Clara’s favourites songs by Brahms, the melancholy Regenlied (Song of the rain) whose poem recalls vivid childhood memories, triggered by the sound of rain against a windowpane. Brahms once agreed to play this Sonata with his friend the violinist Joseph Joachim, but insisted that Joachim perform a Bach sonata first. When Joachim had finished Brahms hurled the music of his own sonata down, declaring: ‘After that, how could anyone play such stuff as this?’

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Schubert and Brahms

Hall One 10.45am Sunday 6 September

Hall One 12.00 noon Sunday 6 September

Peter Cropper violin Martin Roscoe piano

Schubert Sonatina in A minor D 385 Allegro moderato; Andante; Menuetto (Allegro); Allegro Brahms Sonata in A major Op.100 Allegro amabile; Andante tranquillo – Vivace – Andante – Vivace di piu – Andante – Vivace; Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante) Schubert’s six works for violin and piano span nearly the whole of his all-too brief creative life, beginning with the three sonatinas of 1816 and the Sonata in A from the following year, to the large-scale Rondo in B minor from nine years later and the great Fantasy in C of 1827. The three sonatinas are remarkable for their concision and mode of expression and are closely modelled on Mozart’s sonatas. Since their publication these infectiously tuneful works have always been popular with amateur players. Like the G minor Sonatina, the A minor has four movements, all of which broadly follow 18th century models, the exception being the Minuet which has a fast tempo marking, as indeed do the corresponding movements in all but the first of Schubert’s early symphonies - the sonatinas were composed between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. ‘HermioneohneO’ (Hermione without the O) was Brahms’ affectionate name for the gifted mezzo-soprano Hermine Spies, with whom he was romantically associated in the mid-1880s, and she is firmly linked with his Violin Sonata in A major, which incorporates three of her favourite Brahms’ songs. The opening of the first movement subtly alludes to Komm bald (Come soon) with its tender request: ‘Why wait from day to day: the whole garden is blooming for you’. The second theme begins with an adaptation of Wie Melodien zieht es (It draws me like a melody) and the start of the finale quotes Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer in which a girl lies dying, dreaming that her absent lover has returned to her. This opening movement’s Allegro is qualified by the instruction amabile, or ‘tenderly’, and this could almost be applied to the whole of this predominantly sunny and lyrical work, which a friend of Brahms described with some justification as ‘a caress’.

Schubert Sonatina in D major D 384 Allegro molto; Andante; Allegro vivace Brahms Sonata in D minor Op.108 Allegro; Adagio; Un poco presto e con sentimento; Presto agitato Schubert’s Sonatina in D major shows its Mozartian affinity right from the start, with the similarity of its opening theme to that of Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E minor. Yet the music is entirely Schubertian, fresh and tuneful with moments that look forward to his Fifth Symphony of a few months later. After these wonderful early sonatinas what a pity it is that Schubert did not write violin sonatas in the last decade of his life. In 1888 Brahms spent his third consecutive summer at Hofstetten on Lake Thun in Switzerland and once again he was swept away by the beauty of the landscape, going on long walks and bathing – apparently Brahms took particular pleasure in swimming very early in the morning, when no bathing suit was necessary. As in previous years Hofstetten worked its inspirational magic and Brahms returned home to Vienna with a new violin and piano sonata – No.3 in D minor. ‘That my D minor Violin Sonata is strolling tenderly and dreamily beneath your fingers is a most agreeable and friendly thought to me. I have indeed put it on my music stand and accompanied you very thoughtfully and tenderly through the pedal-point shrubbery. Always with you at my side, and I simply know of no greater pleasure than to sit at your side or, as in this case, to stroll with you,’ Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann after she had played the piano in a performance of this Sonata for the first time. This last of Brahms’ violin sonatas is much more dramatic than its two predecessors, and the only one in four movements – a good companion piece for the Schubert Sonatina in D major which is less dramatic than the other two and the only one of them in just three movements. Jeremy Hayes

▼ CURATED BY XENIA JANKOVIC

Xenia Jankovic Music-Image-Imagination How do we listen to music? Let‘s experiment with it. What touches us? How well can we concentrate on only listening? What is happening with our other senses? Do we sometimes see the inner pictures, maybe colours, maybe nature, maybe a story...? If we do not deliberately concentrate on the musicians playing on stage – on what kind of expressions they have, on how they look, how they are dressed, how they move, or possibly on who else is sitting in the audience, – what do we imagine with our inner eye? In these concerts you can experience listening to the music with and without varied visual effects projected on a screen behind the musicians. Here are well chosen cello and piano pieces which naturally have or can have a visual aspect. Come with the musicians to their world of inner imagination and fantasy. Xenia Jankovic

Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth and Ivana Stefanovic Hall Two 9.45am Sunday 6 September Xenia Jankovic cello Nenad Lecic piano Ceda Vasic visual artist Clara Schumann Three Romances Op.22 (version for cello and piano) ‘Dedicated in friendship to Joseph Joachim’, Dusseldorf 1853 Andante molto; Allegretto (mit zartem Vortrage); Leidenschaftlich schnell Ivana Stefanovic Kust Op.3 (after the poem Sacrificing of Isaac by Joseph Brodsky), Belgrade 1974 Andante molto;Agitato; Allegro; Liberamente; Andante molto Ethel Smyth Sonata for cello and piano in A minor Op.5 ‘To Julius Klengel in friendship’, Leipzig 1887 Allegro moderato; Adagio non troppo; Allegro vivace e grazioso

‘Whenever Robert went out,’ Clara Schumann confided in her diary, ‘I spent my time in attempts to compose.’ Clara was a gifted composer, but with a husband and seven children to look after and her performing career as a virtuoso pianist meant that she had very little time to write music. In 1853, as Robert was composing his Violin Concerto, Clara wrote three Romances for violin and piano as a Christmas present for their friend the violinist Joseph Joachim. ‘The reason why no women have become composers is because they have married, and then made their husbands and children the first consideration,’ Ethel Smyth wrote in 1877. Smyth was in Germany, her ‘spiritual home’, studying with Heinrich von Herzogenberg – and falling in love with his wife. Smyth’s circle there included Brahms, Clara Schumann and Joachim, and her immersion in this Brahmsian musical world is reflected in Smyth’s compositions of the time, piano pieces, songs, a string quintet, a violin sonata and the Cello Sonata in A minor. Kust, which the Serbian composer Ivana Stefanovic wrote in 1974 and revised in 2003, was inspired by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky’s Isaac and Abraham which he wrote in 1963, after reading Genesis for the first time. It is a passionate poem written from the point of view of the son rather than the father. Stefanovic saw the story as having another character, the bush – Kust in Russian – beside which Abraham is to sacrifice Isaac. ‘The bush is there as a stump, a wizened tree, imperceptible, as a silent person,’ Stefanovic says. ‘Standing by the road, it can see everything, it can listen, follow, and remember. The bush witnesses and speechlessly follows the drama. My idea was to retell the famous biblical story from the point of view of an invisible witness and to hear what the bush can tell us about it.’ Jeremy Hayes

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Debussy-Shostakovich

Stravinsky-Prokofiev

Hall Two 11.00am Sunday 6 September

Hall Two 12.15pm Sunday 6 September

Xenia Jankovic cello Nenad Lecic piano Ceda Vasic visual artist

Claude Debussy Sonata in D minor Prologue; Sérénade; Finale (from Les Six Sonates pour divers instruments sont offertes en homage à Emma, Son Mari, Claude Debussy), Pourville-Paris 1915 Dmitri Shostakovich Sonata in D minor Op.40 (for Viktor L. Kubatsky), Leningrad 1934 Allegro non troppo; Allegro; Largo; Allegro

Igor Stravinsky Suite Italienne An arrangement for cello and piano of the ballet Pulcinella (Paris 1920) made by Stravinksy and Piatigorsky 1932. Introduzione; Serenata; Aria; Tarantella; Minuetto e Finale Prokofiev Sonata in C major Op.119, Moscow 1949 Andante grave; Moderato; Allegro ma non troppo

Debussy signed the ‘Six Sonates’, of which one is this for cello and piano, as being by ‘un musicien français’, a term both literal and heavy with symbolism. He was mortally ill – he only completed three – but it was in an attempt to establish his music as part of the true French tradition, distinguished by ‘clarity, elegance, simple and natural declamation...’ While the First World War raged in the north, the sick, despairing composer made a last attempt to express the quintessence of French genius ‘fantasy in sensitivity’, against the ‘heroic theatrics’ of the Germans, personified, of course, by Wagner. He succeeded: this fragile, bittersweet and often playful late flower is the quintessence of Debussy’s dream-like vision of pure music. Beginning with sinuous, feline arabesques, it tumbles into a slapstick ‘serenade’ full of pizzicato high-jinks and eerie on-the-bridge chattering and ends in triumphant, sweeping joy. Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata was written for his friend, the cellist Viktor Kubatsky two years before the composer was officially censored for his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Nevertheless, it is far from straightforward: structured on classical lines, with spacious scoring and a long-limbed lyrical opening over lilting arpeggios, the work is apparently conventional. But immediately its songful utterance is disturbed by a peppering of notes that don’t belong. As it veers between the romantic minor and cheerful major we begin to feel slightly queasy. The gloriously limpid second subject, which arches up heavenwards and resolves on to major chord seems to settle the question but is immediately undermined by the military rat-a-tat-tat that dominates the development. The starkly beautiful coda seems to set the seal on the truth of the work, and prefigures the dark, still tragedy of the Largo. In between comes the savage Scherzo, which tears away at a repeated figure for 17 measures, before bumping into a comedy nursery tune and zooming into the stratosphere with high cello harmonics. The final movement is ironically comic, as Shostakovich scholar Ian Macdonald has written: ‘a one-fingered rondo melody, idiotically pleased with itself, parades up and down between interludes of deranged academic exercises…’.

It was Diaghilev, the great ballet impresario, who, in 1920, suggested that Stravinsky pen some stylish orchestrations of the 18th century composer Pergolesi for his next ballet. Pulcinella, based on a highly involved commedia del arte drama, was the result, though arguments have raged ever since about who the original scores were by – the consensus is now that about half was by Giambattista Pergolesi and the rest by contemporary composers Domenico Gallo and Parisotti. What is certain is that Stravinsky stamped his personality on this ballet as surely as he had on the Rite of Spring, and it vibrates with his inimitable vitality, plus wholly 20th century orchestrations – the high oboe and bassoon, modern string effects, bright trumpet and comic sliding trombome of the 1920s. In 1932 Stravinsky and the great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, made this irresistible arrangement of some of the best numbers for cello and piano, named the Suite Italienne. We hear a hopeful love Serenade, a drunken-sounding buffo bass and sly versions of 18th century dances. Prokofiev prefaced the manuscript of this piece with a quotation from Gorky – ‘Man, that has a proud sound,’ a comment that could be read in several ways, one being a literal description of the glorious resonance of the cello’s C string, with which it begins. However, the swaggering pomp of his opening doesn’t ring quite true. It’s not long before a mischievous little tune bubbles up and we suspect the composer of making fools of us all. Indeed, the piece is a veritable circus of clownish tricks and flights of extravagant fancy with a completely over-the-top celebratory finale. It’s a miracle Prokofiev managed to pull off such a confident work at all, since it was written four years before his death, when, already suffering from ill-health, he had been subject to Stalin’s notorious ‘trials’ and accused of writing ‘formalist’ music, not suitable for the Soviet masses. This Sonata is a caustic response to the authorities: ‘I can do you a sugary comedy, if that is what is required, I can even stuff it with gorgeous, singable melodies – but I shall add a tincture of poison, so beware!’ There is only one moment when he lets his guard down: an eerie, twilit interlude in the extrovert finale, where time stands still and we glimpse the abyss. Helen Wallace

▼ PANGOLIN LONDON AND KINGS PLACE GALLERY

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Meet the Artist Meet the Artist is a series of talks and discussions with artists who have work on exhibition at Kings Place during the Festival. These events offer a unique opportunity to discover more about each artist’s working processes, the theories and concerns present in their work, and their thoughts and feelings.

73 Abigail Fallis St Pancras Room 11.15am Sunday 6 September

72 Jon Buck St Pancras Room 10.00am Sunday 6 September In discussion with Pangolin London director Rungwe Kingdon, sculptor Jon Buck will talk about the new work that forms the basis of his first major London solo show – at Pangolin London from 18 November 2009 to 10 January 2010. Born in 1951, Jon Buck studied at Nottingham and Manchester Art Schools. He has had numerous public commissions and exhibitions across the UK and is an associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Jon’s lively human and animal sculptures – some of which feature in Pangolin London’s In the Mix II – look back to a time when animals were worshipped, and explore humanity’s need for cultural icons. Through the reduction of detail to simple line and volume, Jon gives his ideas a powerful and direct expression while his bold and joyful use of colour enhances our primary response to each piece.

Kings Place sculptor-in-residence Abigail Fallis – in conversation with Pangolin London director Rungwe Kingdon – will talk about her varied working processes, the concerns that affect her work and the unusual materials she uses to create her sculpture. Abigail Fallis studied at Camberwell College of Arts and has since exhibited widely across the country. She has been working in a studio at Pangolin London since December 2008, during which time she has completed two highly successful outreach projects with local primary schools. The pupils’ work is currently on display at Kings Place alongside Pangolin London’s exhibition In The Mix II. The sculpture residency will culminate in a major solo show of Abigail’s work in spring 2010. Abigail Fallis is fundamentally interested in the topical issues that affect our daily lives. She tackles such themes with considerable wit and humour, experimenting widely with a broad range of materials from silver to cloth, papier-mâché to shopping trolleys.

Ian McKeever St Pancras Room 12.30pm Sunday 6 September Ian McKeever will be in conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, one of the main contributors to the monograph Ian McKeever Paintings, published to coincide with his exhibition Ian McKeever – Temple Paintings, at Kings Place Gallery, from 4 September – 17 October 2009. Ian McKeever – Temple Paintings, marks the first time this group of monumental paintings is exhibited in the UK. Executed between 2004-2006, the Temple Paintings previously shown in Denmark and in Germany, reveal McKeever’s continuing interest in exploring a visual language that oscillates between figuration and abstraction. As Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton writes in the 2009 essay on McKeever, 'The Temple Paintings are concerned first and foremost with painting and within that endeavour the expression of fullness – of experience and consciousness.' The discussion between the artist and the author, will consider the evolution of the artist’s distinctive work, the significance of body, structure, and architectural relationships in his recent paintings, McKeever’s own writings and its relationship to his paintings, his extensive travels to remote areas, and the impetus for the Temple Paintings. Ian McKeever was born in 1946 in Withernsea, East Yorkshire. In 2006 he was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy Schools of Art, London. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, Scandinavia and America, and his work is represented in numerous collections including the Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton is an art historian, writer and critic who has written for many leading arts publications. She has selected for the prestigious British Art Show, and was National Director of Visual Arts for Arts Council England, 1993-2006.

▼ CURATED BY THE CLERKS

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

The Clerks Songbook The Clerks Songbook presents a miscellany of works, past and present, representing our increasingly varied repertoire: ranging from 14th century Italian caccia (as re-invented by Ian McMillan), through 15th and 16th century laments, to settings of personal ads and spam e-mail from the 21st century.

THE CLERKS Ruth Clegg, Lucy Ballard altos Tom Raskin, Roy Rashbrook tenors Edward Wickham, Ed Grint basses

Ten Songs to Hear before you Die Atrium 1.30pm Sunday 6 September

Edward Wickham director

7 7 6 75 7 FREE

FREE

Robert Morton (c.1430-c.1479) 'Il sera pour vous/L’homme armé' Jean Ockeghem 'Ma bouche rit' Anon (Italian, C15th) 'Fortuna desperata' Guillaume Dufay 'En triumphant de Cruel Dueil' Gilles Binchois (c.1400-1460) 'Comme femme desconfortée' Guillaume Dufay 'Dona gentile, bella come l’oro' Walter Frye (d. before 1475) 'So ys emprentid' Johannes Wreede (fl. 1451-c.1482) 'Nunca fué pena mayor' Jacobus Barbireau (1455-1491) 'Een vroylic wesen' Jacob Obrecht (1457/8-1505) 'Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen' Something like the Hit-Parade circa 1500, featuring some of the most popular songs of the early Renaissance. In our line-up we include a Eurovision-style survey of songs from across Europe – from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands.

Five Steps to Heaven Atrium 12.30pm Sunday 6 September Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) 'Ave regina coelorum' Josquin Des Prez (c.1455-1521) 'Nymphes des bois' Josquin Des Prez 'Pater noster/Ave Maria' Johannes Ockeghem (c.1425-1497) 'Mort tu as navré' Antony Pitts (b. 1969) 'Thou wast present' Five motets about death, drawn from our recent In Memoria programme. 'Nymphes des bois' and 'Mort tu as navré' Anon (Italian, C14th) are laments by composers on beloved peers: the former honours Johannes Ockeghem, the latter Gilles Binchois. Dufay’s motet and Josquin’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria are rather more peculiar – works which the composers wrote to be sung after their death and (in the case of the Dufay) as they lay dying. Antony Pitts’s work was specially composed for the In Memoria project and sets a Greek Orthodox prayer, while also drawing on melodic material from Josquin’s 'Nymphes des bois'.

Twenty Ways to Improve your Life Atrium 2.30pm Sunday 6 September Christopher Fox (b. 1955) 'Twenty Ways to Improve your Life' Anon (English, C15th) 'After the Mass' words by Ian Duhig Anon (Italian, C14th) 'The man who spills his soup' words by Ian McMillan Further works from The Clerks Songbook tbc Christopher Fox’s quirky settings of personal ads and e-mail spam is a contemporary addition to the 17th century Cries of London genre by the likes of Orlando Gibbons. Following this impulse to contemporise, we include specially commissioned contrafacta by Ian McMillan, Ian Duhig and others in which old songs appear with new texts – a technique entirely in keeping with Medieval and Renaissance practice.

▼ CURATED BY COLIN MATTHEWS

Works for Wind For the Kings Place opening festival last year I devised a series of three programmes with music by Schumann, Britten and myself, for violin, viola and cello, with piano, and I’ve returned to this theme again, this time using clarinet, oboe, horn and piano. The Schumann works were easy to select, although the arrangement of the Adagio and Allegro made by Britten for Dennis Brain in 1956 is virtually unknown. Britten’s only chamber music work involving horn is the Third Canticle of 1954, setting words by Edith Sitwell – at the first performance the soloists were Dennis Brain and Peter Pears. Britten completed no solo works for clarinet, so I have made an arrangement for clarinet and piano of his 1941 Mazurka Elegiaca for two pianos: this forms the second movement of my recent reconstruction of Britten’s Clarinet Concerto, which he started to write for Benny Goodman in 1942. There are several works of Britten’s for oboe and piano written in the 1930s, but the Six Metamorphoses are one of the great solo works for the instrument, first performed on a boat on Thorpeness Meare at the 1952 Aldeburgh Festival. My own work for clarinet is yet another arrangement – the Three Enigmas were originally written for cello and piano in 1985, and arranged for clarinet (and bass clarinet) in 1989. Duologue was written for Nicholas Daniel in 1991; my work for Richard Watkins is, at the time of writing, only just begun, and as yet has no title! Colin Matthews

78 Schumann / Britten / Matthews Hall One 2.15pm Sunday 6 September Michael Collins clarinet Michael McHale piano Britten arr. Colin Matthews Mazurka Elegiaca Colin Matthews Three Studies Schumann Fantasiestücke In 1942, whilst he was in America, Benjamin Britten began a Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman, but this was never completed and Colin Matthews recently reconstructed it, using Britten’s sketches and also some of the music he wrote around the time of the Concerto. For the slow movement Matthews used the Mazurka Elegiaca for two pianos which Britten had composed in 1941 in response to a commission for a piece in memory of Paderewski. Having orchestrated this music for the Clarinet Concerto, Matthews points out that arranging it for clarinet and piano will actually be making a piano reduction of an orchestration of a work for two pianos! Colin Matthews’ Three Studies are arrangements for clarinet of his Three Enigmas for cello and piano of 1985. ‘To explain the title would, obviously, take away the enigma,’ Matthews says. ‘But there is nothing particularly mysterious intended, only an indication of the rather introverted, hermetic nature of the music (and the musical processes employed). The outer movements are both basically fast and hectic, though with moments of repose, and a feature of both is that clarinet and piano have extended passages in unison.’ These two outer pieces are for B-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, whereas the central one is for E-flat clarinet and is in fact a new piece, the second Enigma being virtually impossible to arrange for clarinet. Robert Schumann was a composer whose music Britten loved, and he often performed and programmed it. The Fantasiestücke, Op.73 for clarinet and piano were the first in a series of short pieces that Schumann wrote for various solo instruments. He borrowed the title from one of his favourite authors, E T A Hoffmann and the pieces were conceived as a continuous suite, as indicated by the instruction attacca at the ends of the first two.

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Schumann / Britten / Matthews

Hall One 3.30pm Sunday 6 September

Hall One 4.45pm Sunday 6 September

Nicholas Daniel oboe Huw Watkins piano

Richard Watkins horn Huw Watkins piano Daniel Norman tenor

Britten Six Metamorphoses after Ovid Colin Matthews Duologue Schumann arr. Howard Ferguson Three Duos Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid had their premiere at a rather unusual venue when they were played by their dedicatee, Joy Boughton, on a punt on Thorpeness Meare at the 1951 Aldeburgh Festival. In the event all went according to plan except that the autograph manuscript fell into the water and had to be retrieved rather quickly. Each movement portrays a character from classical mythology and their metamorphosis, so each piece is a variation on its own opening music. The movements are: Pan, Phaeton, Niobe, Bacchus, Narcissus and Arethusa. Colin Matthews composed Duologue for Nicholas Daniel in 1991. The first movement Matthews describes as ‘a kind of moto perpetuo which requires a soloist with iron lungs; by contrast the second movement is very still and quiet, with decorative melismas from both piano and oboe (many of whose notes are ‘bent’, using quarter tones). The finale is a gently satirical attempt to review the ‘finale problem’ – perhaps best explained by saying that this is something well known to composers. Having recently made a realisation of the Mozart Musical Dice Game I composed a number of small blocks of rather predictable material for the piano, then threw dice in order to put them into an unpredictable sequence. The oboe does not know what is going on, and its attempts to join in are frustrated until finally the pair of them do get together, only to bring about an abrupt ending.’ Schumann wrote two sets of pieces for the pedal piano, a piano with a pedal-board like an organ: Six Pieces in Canonic Form, Op.56 and Four Sketches, Op.58. In 1976 Howard Ferguson arranged three of these pieces (Op.56/2, Op.58/4 and Op.56/6) for clarinet and piano as Three Duos from Schumann, and the oboe version for Nicholas Daniel followed a few years later.

Britten Canticle III ‘Still Falls the Rain’ Colin Matthews new work (1st performance) Schumann arr. Britten Adagio and Allegro ‘Your great poem has dragged something from me that was latent there, and shown me what lies before me,’ Britten wrote to Edith Sitwell after the first performance of his Canticle III in 1955. It is a setting, for tenor, horn and piano, of Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain: The Raids 1940. Night and Dawn. This sombre and powerful poem is also an allegory of the crucifixion and suffering of Christ, and it inspired some of Britten’s darkest music. Colin Matthews’ new work is, at the time of writing, only just begun. He wrote his Horn Concerto for Richard Watkins in 2001. Britten felt very close to Schumann’s music and played, conducted and programmed it. In 1956, as part of an all-Schumann concert at the Aldeburgh Festival, Britten partnered the horn player Dennis Brain in Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro, and for that performance Britten and Brain made their own edition of the music. In his note for the concert Britten observed that for some of Schumann’s works the ‘severe technical demands have fought against their popularity. This Adagio and Allegro (1849) is no exception. It needs superhuman endurance on the part of the hornist’. Britten’s arrangement is nowhere near as radical as his performing edition of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’ for example, and is very much a practical musician’s approach, making the horn part slightly less taxing by omitting a few notes to allow the player time to breathe, usually in places where the horn is doubled by the piano anyway. The piano part is virtually unchanged except for one important place: the beginning of the central section of the Allegro, where Britten allows the horn ten bars rest and gives its part to the piano, in the tenor register. Jeremy Hayes

▼ CURATED BY SOUND AND MUSIC

Sound and Music presents notes inégales

Sound and Music is pleased to present notes inégales – one of Europe’s most innovative ensembles, featuring some of the finest new music players in the UK – moving from contemporary repertoire at the highest (and most spontaneous) level to one-page scores to open improvisation. notes inégales – which refers to the ‘swung’ notes in French baroque music – was created by Peter Wiegold and trombonist David Purser. Their aim was to bring together top new music players who were devoted to improvisation as well as written music, and to devising new work alongside composers and other artists as well as playing contemporary repertoire. The ensemble is known for the vivacity of its performances, its sheer liveness and unpredictability, and for an impressive range that can go from tight and funky to chaotic and wild. Peter Wiegold conducts and directs improvisation from the keyboard using a range of signals to push ideas through. notes inégales has performed at the iF Festival, at the Union Chapel with performance poet Murray Lachlan Young and last year at the ICA as part of ...Brew: The Miles Davis Project, for which several leading contemporary composers offered ‘postcards’ from Miles Davis. These three concerts show the whole range of the ensemble’s activities, from open improvisation stimulated by a set of postcards, to working from the visual stimulus of Christian Marclay’s Shuffle, to the UK premiere of Peter Wiegold’s beautiful piece Earth and Stars, written to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Sound and Music supports these performances as part of its ongoing commitment to promoting challenging and exciting new work. www.soundandmusic.org: a new place to share, learn and create

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

81 Shuffle I: notes inégales Hall Two 2.30pm Sunday 6 September Six Sound and Music shortlist composers have submitted musical ‘postcards’ around the theme of ‘shuffle’ or ‘swing’. Some are score-based, some are audio files. These will be fed in to notes inégales’ improvisation, directed by signals from Peter Wiegold to create a spontaneous performance. Composers and composer/performers may join the improvisation. The performance will start with soloists from notes inégales (Torbjorn Hultmark, trumpet/electronics, Melinda Maxwell, oboe, Martin Butler, piano, Christophe Fellay, percussion) building back to the full group.

83 Earth & Sky: notes inégales Earth and Stars (UK premiere) Peter Wiegold Hall Two 3.45pm Sunday 6 September Peter Wiegold’s Earth and Stars was inspired by a poem written by Mozart, Here Rests a Dear Fool, and was commissioned by ensemble xxj Vienna for Mozart’s 250th anniversary and performed by them in 2006. The piece is a requiem for Mozart, and the composer has also built in musical echoes of fin-desiècle Vienna. Performed by an unusual ensemble – piccolo, cor anglais, contra bassoon, viola, double bass, piano, percussion and four harmonicas – the piece consists of a series of funeral marches, often with keening solos. The music is dark, earthy and a little incomplete, sounding like some archaic funeral band that has been dug up from the soil, and no one can quite remember how to play the instruments or the music!

Shuffle II: Christian Marclay notes inégales performs Christian Marclay’s Shuffle Hall Two 3.45pm Sunday 6 September Christian Marclay photographed the appearance of musical notation in everyday places – finding examples on shop awnings, chocolate tins, T-shirts, underwear and other unexpected places. He then presented the 75 images in a box of oversized playing cards, creating a chance-based visual experience that is also the basis for a spontaneous musical score.

▼ CURATED BY TWISTED LOUNGE

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Twisted Lounge presents... Twisted Lounge exists to promote and support live musical performance of different genres with established and emerging artists. In 2008 Twisted Lounge became a moveable feast, taking its unique and eclectic brand to venues such as Café OTO and Kings Place, and collaborating with a host of different curators and musicians. This autumn it will present two events for the Out Hear series of concerts at Kings Place – the London Improvisers Orchestra in September and Orphy Robinson’s TSCR for Black History Month in October. Twisted Lounge is delighted to be working with curators David Toop, Leon Michener and Melanie Abrahams for this series of events.

Twisted Lounge – The Paine of Pleasure

Twisted Lounge – Tilt’s London Liming

St Pancras Room 2.45pm Sunday 6 September Curated by Leon Michener

St Pancras Room 5.15pm Sunday 6 September Curated by Melanie Abrahams

A schizoid babble fantasy – performed by consort of voices Glossalia with improvisation maestro Mark Sanders on drums and Leon Michener on piano – extemporising in the modern style on ground bass provided by Henry Purcell. Expect English Renaissance airs, free improvisation, speaking in tongues, automatic writing, score-paintings, unconsciousness and afternoon dream clouds…

Tilt presents poetry, comedy and scurrilous speech from some of the most exciting literary mouths and minds around.

85 Twisted Lounge – Sinister Resonance: An Uncanny Encounter With Sound St Pancras Room 4.00pm Sunday 6 September Curated by David Toop David Toop’s Sinister Resonance might be described as an event lying somewhere between literary reading, mini-opera, scientific experiment and séance. Featuring performers including David Toop on voice and laptop, Aleks Kolkowski on 78 rpm antique gramophones, Elaine and Jamie McDermott on vocals and Leon Michener on piano, Sinister Resonance will examine the close relationship between sound and the uncanny. It will focus on subjects from David’s forthcoming book, Sinister Resonance: Listening to the Uncanny, including silence in 17th-century Dutch genre painting and paranoid listening in 19thand early 20th-century supernatural fiction.

London Liming: where spoken word meets carnival, presenting poetry, fiction, song and an anthology launch. London Liming mixes poetry, music and audience participation to bring carnival to London: featuring Mellow Baku, Charlie Dark, Michael Horovitz and Aoife Mannix, plus the launch of a POE! Anthology (Poetry Olympics Enlightenment) of poets, fiction writers and wordsmiths, edited by Michael Horovitz, John Hegley, Melanie Abrahams and Adam Horovitz. Mellow Baku weaves rich musical prose using jazz and reggae amongst other influences. She has worked with artists including Jean Binta Breeze and Michie One at venues including the Barbican and North Sea Jazz Festival. Charlie Dark is a writer, producer and DJ specialising in poetry and the communication of stories. He is founder of the urban Nikesupported running club Run Dem Crew. Michael Horovitz has been described as a ‘popular, experienced, experimental...Jazz Generation, Sensitive Bard’ (by Allen Ginsberg) and is considered to be one of the last great Beat poets from the generation of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg. Aoife Mannix is the author of four collections of poetry including The Trick of Foreign Words and a novel Heritage of Secrets. She has toured widely and her writing has been broadcast on BBC Radio. Melanie Abrahams is an entrepreneur who curates and produces spoken word and literature including the Best Theatre/Play EMMA Award nominated ‘modern love’. www.ontilt.org

▼ CURATED BY CHILINGIRIAN QUARTET

Chilingirian Quartet Haydn provided the backbone of our last series at Kings Place in December 2008. Great quartet composition began with Haydn and to this day, he provides the benchmark of originality, depth and joy. We therefore have no hesitation in closing our second concert with his great C major Quartet, a mould-breaking piece if ever there was one, with a gypsy lament at its centre and a serene song as its finale. This piece must have given the inspiration to Bartók and Britten, both of whom dare to end their works softly (Mozart almost does, only adding two final loud chords). Britten’s Third Quartet had a profound effect on our development as a quartet. I remember hearing the broadcast of its first performance by the Amadeus Quartet and being deeply moved by its simple and direct expression. The central solo enters a world beyond our normal one and the end of the piece connects life with death, something Britten anticipated, knowing that his life was near its end. At the invitation of Peter Pears, we played it at the Aldeburgh Festival and our last hushed note was accompanied by the haunting bells of Orford Church – an eerie and unforgettable experience. Mozart was a favourite of Britten’s, himself a supreme interpreter of the piano concerti, symphonies and operas of his great predecessor. These two composers are so much at one in their vocal lines and ability to communicate that we often programme them in the same half of concerts. Bartók’s sixth string quartet is suffused with the impending Second World War. The overall mood is sad, although the lively dance rhythms provide plenty of excitement. However, when we arrive at its conclusion, all life is sucked out and a bare memory remains of extreme melancholy. Bartók foresaw the ruin of his homeland and of the life he so cherished. Levon Chilingirian

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

La Serenissima

Sad Premonitions and Happy Endings

Hall One 7.00pm Sunday 6 September CHILINGIRIAN QUARTET

Hall One 8.15pm Sunday 6 September CHILINGIRIAN QUARTET

Britten String Quartet No. 3 (1974) Duets: With moderate movement; Ostinato: Very fast Solo: Very calm; Burlesque: Fast – con fuoco; Recitative and Passacaglia (La Serenissima) Mozart String Quartet in D major K499 Allegretto; Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio; Adagio; Allegro

Bartók String Quartet No. 6 Mesto – Vivace; Mesto – Marcia; Mesto – Burletta (Moderato); Mesto Haydn String Quartet Op.54 No. 2 Vivace; Adagio; Menuetto: Allegretto; Finale: AdagioPresto-Adagio

Britten’s Third Quartet, of 1974, was his last major work. He died twelve days before its premiere, and it’s a fitting musical epitaph. The sparse textures reflect his late style, while the music of Bartók, Shostakovich and Mahler, all of whom he admired, are hinted at in music and name; Burlesque movements appear in Bartók’s sixth and last quartet, and in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Britten’s own Divertimenti of 1936 also include a Burlesque, and there’s a self-reference in La serenissima (‘Venice’) quoting Death in Venice. The part-writing is intricate, with individual movement titles describing their structure. The quartet is intensely lyrical; musicologist Hans Keller was moved to declare that Britten had entered ‘into the Mozartian realm of the instrumental purification of opera’. Determination, tension and perhaps Britten’s painful frustration can often be heard, even within the violin’s exquisite Solo. The last movement particularly feels like a conscious musical adieu, despite the closing chord’s lack of resolution. Britten’s biographer, Donald Mitchell, interpreted it as Britten saying, ‘I’m not dead yet’. Mozart was also nearing the end of his life when he composed his Hoffmeister Quartet of 1786, although he didn’t know it. Professionally, life was good. He’d just premiered The Marriage of Figaro and was at the height of his success. However, he was also in financial difficulties and mourning the death of his third son. He would die in 1791. Despite this, the outer movements and Minuet sound carefree, their easy grace masking highly complicated part-writing. Figaro must have been fresh in Mozart’s mind as he composed the Adagio; its dramatic, pathostinged beauty is reminiscent of the Countess’s soliloquies and is an eloquent illustration of Keller’s observation. The Finale too, with its forward momentum, instrumental dialogue and suspense-filled pauses, contains as much dramatic tension as any comic opera finale.

If Britten’s last quartet ended with the suggestion of more to come, Bartók’s ends with finality. It was composed in 1938 amidst impending worldwide and personal crisis. His mother would die in 1939, his native Hungary had taken Germany’s side in the erupting war, and his anti-Nazi views would result in permanent exile to America in 1940. This was the last work he would write on home soil, and its sadness and tension are palpable. The quartet is Bartók through and through with its strong folk elements and rhythmic emphasis. All four movements start with the same mesto (‘sad’) motto. After the pained Vivace’s folk rhythms comes a foreboding march, gate-crashed by a tipsy gypsy band. The violently leering Burlesque comes as a shock after its introductory mesto theme, but calm is restored by the mesto’s final appearance, with pizzicato cello bringing proceedings to a whispered close. It’s left to a Hungarian-based Austrian to end today’s concert on a happier note. Haydn’s three Op.54 quartets of 1788 were written for Johann Tost, leader of the Esterháza Court Orchestra’s second violins. Haydn loved musical surprises, and the cheerful Vivace’s opening theme contains humorous, unexpected pauses. However, Haydn must have deeply admired Tost’s musicality to write such a profound, rhapsodic Adagio for him, reminiscent of the strains of gypsy violins. After the Minuet, with a theme so liked at Esterháza it was used for the court librarian’s musical clock, the Finale contains more trickery. Finales were traditionally fast-paced, but here it’s more of a wafer-thin Presto sandwich. A soulful Adagio eventually leads into the sprightly central section, but soon the instruments play a dominant seventh chord. You expect this to herald more fast-paced music, but instead the Adagio returns. Charlotte Gardner

▼ CURATED BY IAIN BURNSIDE

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Iain Burnside and friends Composer, Ivor Gurney’s gravestone reads, Poet of the Severn and Somme. Gurney stands alone in 20th century British music: a one-off; a tricky customer; a prickly creative genius who emerges nearly a century later as strangely likeable; a faithful friend; a witty, cultured man. Gurney shone his torch in dark corners of what were already tragic decades. While the Severn poet celebrated the joys and beauties of his native Gloucestershire, the Somme poet offered an Other Ranks viewpoint of the First World War. Serving as a Private in the 2nd/5th Glosters, Gurney wrote both songs and poems that have now entered our cultural bloodstream. Gurney’s equal, if belated, acclaim as both poet and composer invite comparison with Thomas Campion; his depression and bleak final years in an asylum invite comparison with Robert Schumann. But while his story suggests elegy and nostalgia, we try to redress the balance with Gurney’s energy, humour and tenderness. Our programme is a taster of both words and music. Gurney would have recognised a handful of the Late Night Lovesongs that follow. And I hope he’d have been cheered by the rest of this easy-on-the-ear nocturnal selection. We have folk songs, art songs, great songs, silly songs – all united under the banner of Boy meets Girl. Well, Boy mostly meets Girl. This is the 21st century. Alarmingly, at one point, Girl meets Animal. Hey nonny nonny… Iain Burnside

Ivor Gurney: Poet and Composer

Late Night Lovesongs

Hall One 9.30pm Sunday 6 September Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano Simon Cole actor Iain Burnside piano

Hall One 10.45pm Sunday 6 September Sophie Bevan soprano David Stout baritone Iain Burnside piano

Son of Gloucester, nightwalker, soldier, poet, composer – Ivor Gurney was all these and more. Our programme puts Gurney’s songs next to his letters and poems, some of them written in the trenches of the 1st World War.

The sublime jostles with the ridiculous in songs going in and out of love, including music by Finzi, Grainger, Quilter, Geoffrey Poole and Tarik O’Regan.

▼ CURATED BY SERIOUS

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

In All Seriousness... Publishing group In All Seriousness, working in partnership with Big Life Music, has the led the way in supporting innovative composers in the worlds of jazz, world, electronica and beyond. Here it presents a series of concerts featuring the work of four of the UK’s most distinctive musical voices – Max de Wardener, Jason Yarde, Andy Sheppard and Sebastian Rochford.

Max de Wardener

Andy Sheppard

Hall Two 7.15pm Sunday 6 September

Hall Two 9.45pm Sunday 6 September

Max de Wardener is an arch-experimentalist whose work weaves an atmospheric tapestry of gentle oratorio, tonal grandeur and shimmering, cut-up electronics – shown to great effect in his 2004 debut album Where I Am Today. An explorer in the worlds of contemporary composition, instrument making, electronica and sonic art, Max’s work can be heard in a variety of fields, encompassing live performance, recorded music and sound design. He has also written numerous scores for film and television, notably for Pawel Pawlikowsky’s acclaimed British film Last Resort. Tonight you will hear a selection of solo piano works written for extraordinary Russian pianist GéNIA, as well as a work for two soprano saxophones specially arranged for the individual sounds of Jason Yarde and Andy Sheppard.

Established for over 25 years as a successful composer and performer, Andy Sheppard is one of very few British musicians to have made a significant impact on the international jazz scene, playing and writing for a variety of settings from solo to big band and chamber orchestra. His compositions incorporate a strong and characteristic sense of lyricism alongside a very personal use of rhythms from Asia, Africa and South America. Recent years have also seen a growing fascination with new music technologies and club culture, and his work in this area carries a heady mix of ambient electronic soundscapes, fragments of spoken word and sampled urban sounds. Sheppard’s distinctive style can be heard on numerous recordings, including the critically acclaimed Movements in Colour, his first album for prestigious label ECM. Tonight he will premiere a selection of solo works for saxophone in addition to collaborating with other In All Seriousness composer-performers.

94 Jason Yarde Hall Two 8.30pm Sunday 6 September

Sebastian Rochford

Hall Two 11.00pm Sunday 6 September Composer, arranger, producer and saxophonist Jason Yarde writes music that has been described as powerful, spiritual, evocative, rhapsodic, hair-raising and formidable. Jason began playing alto and soprano saxophones with the Jazz Warriors while still a teenager and then went on to MD this landmark orchestra and become one of its principal writers. He composes across a variety of musical styles, taking in progressive jazz, classical, hip-hop fusion, soul and free improvisation. Indeed, his potential and originality is such that he was nominated for the Bird Award at the 2004 North Sea Jazz Festival and for the Jazz on 3 Innovation Award at the 2005 and 2006 BBC Jazz Awards. Recent commissions have included works for the Britten Sinfonia, the Kronos Quartet, the BBC Concert Orchestra at the BBC Proms, and for South African musical legend Hugh Masekela and the London Symphony Orchestra. For tonight’s intimate setting Yarde will perform a set of chamber works featuring material from his numerous live projects.

Sebastian Rochford is the extraordinarily imaginative and adventurous composer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist whose output has turned British jazz on its head. Sebastian’s open-minded attitude to collaboration and his ubiquitous presence on the London scene with his own bands – the Mercury Award-nominated Polar Bear, jazz-punk group Fulborn Teversham and avant-garde rock trio Big Dave, as well as his partnership with Pete Wareham from Acoustic Ladyland – has firmly established him at the forefront of the UK’s current multi-genre zeitgeist. It’s no surprise to find that his many and diverse influences include Beethoven, Björk, Skepta, Burial, Prince and contemporary electronica as well as a large dose of jazz. For this event, Sebastian will perform works from his new project, Room of Kantinas, which displays his skills as a songwriter and guitarist as well as his deserved reputation as one of the country’s finest drummers.

▼ CURATED BY ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Royal Academy of Music at Kings Place After six packed Royal Academy of Music events at the Kings Place opening festival in 2008, the Academy is delighted to be involved in the second festival of 100 concerts. Our four events will give you a taste of the vitality and diversity of Academy life from a prize-winning solo pianist through to late night jazz. We start with talented young pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, winner of the Keyboard Finals of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004 at the age of 11. He makes his debut at Kings Place with a programme of virtuoso piano works. Our second event features one of our many fine Academy duos presenting a programme of French violin works. The ever-popular Debussy Violin Sonata, Saint-Saëns virtuosic Havanaise, Ravel’s sultry Spanish-inspired Pièce en forme de Habanera and romantic showpiece Tzigane exhibit the fashionable exoticism of 20th-century French repertoire. The Rusalka Piano Trio continue the Academy’s events with a programme of classic chamber works by Haydn and Ravel’s timeless masterpiece, the Piano Trio in A minor. We round off the evening with a late night jazz concert. Many of the most exciting and innovative young jazz players to arrive on the London scene in recent years have studied at the Academy. This final performance of the evening will showcase the Sam Leak Trio. Described by Helen Mayhew as ‘one of the brightest young stars in the jazz piano galaxy, a heavenly improviser and a brilliant prospect for the future,’ Sam and his trio, joined by the great saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, will perform a selection of their own original compositions. Britain’s incomparably rich musical life is permeated with Academy-trained musicians from Arthur Sullivan to Simon Rattle, extending into the worlds of Annie Lennox and Elton John. Do join us at Kings Place to explore the next generation of musical talent. ‘the freshness and commitment gave pure pleasure’ The Observer, March 2009

▼ CURATED BY ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

Benjamin Grosvenor Piano Recital

The French Violin

St Pancras Room 7.30pm Sunday 6 September

St Pancras Room 8.45pm Sunday 6 September

Benjamin Grosvenor piano

Eloisa-Fleur Thom violin Timothy End piano

Kapustin Eight Concert Etudes Op.40 No.6, Pastoral; No.7, Intermezzo; No.3, Toccatina Liszt Sonata in B minor Born in Gorlovka, Ukraine in 1937, Nikolai Kapustin originally aspired to be a concert pianist. But while studying at the Moscow Conservatoire, he became interested in jazz and composition, and developed a unique compositional style, fusing jazz influences with his own brand of muscular Russian pianism. Though his works remained little known for decades, recent advocacy by pianists such as Steven Osborne and MarcAndre Hamelin have brought him international acclaim. The Eight Concert Etudes, Op.40 (1984) are influenced by many different jazz styles. Pastoral uses a ragtime figuration, but is imbued with the lyricism and expansiveness found in Oscar Peterson’s playing. Intermezzo begins with lush harmonies that recall George Shearing but this is interleaved with increasingly long segments of virtuosic ‘stride’ piano writing in the style of Art Tatum. Toccatina combines the rapid-fire virtuosity that one associates with Prokofiev with the rhythmic life of Latin jazz pianists such as Chucho Valdez and Michel Camilo. Though Franz Liszt’s output for the piano contains hundreds of works, the Sonata in B minor (composed 1852-1853) towers over these as arguably his most important contribution to the piano repertoire. Though he had retired from his pianistic career in 1847, Liszt’s conducting schedule as Kappelmeister in Weimar in these years as well as the complications arising from his relationship with his mistress, Princess Caroline, make it difficult to imagine when he found any time to compose. But Liszt produced not only the Sonata but much of Années de Pèlerinage and several symphonic poems. The ingenuity of the sonata’s architecture is remarkable – all the melodic and motivic material of the work grows out of the first 17 bars. Liszt transforms these motifs in countless ways, often inverting the original affect so that a menacing motif might reappear later as a lyrical theme. The large-scale structure can be seen both as four movements rolled into one (like Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy), or as one massive sonata form. The Sonata received scathing criticism from many of his peers when first published, including the dedicatee Schumann, but its reputation grew with the advocacy of his students and it is now considered one of the most significant sonatas written in the 19th century. Zubin Kanga

Debussy Violin Sonata in G minor L.140 Allegro vivo; Intermède: Fantasque et léger; Finale: Très animé Saint-Saëns Havanaise Op.83 Ravel Piece en forme de Habanera Ravel Tzigane The music of Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Ravel provides some of the most lyrical repertoire for the violin, as well as demonstrating the exotic fire and impressionist cool inherent in French early twentieth century writing. Debussy’s sonata was his last work completed before his death; by the time of writing he was suffering from terminal cancer while living through World War I. It is astonishing that a work so full of light and energy was written in these circumstances. The final movement was the first completed; it contains fragments which were worked into the first two, giving the sonata cyclical unity despite its whimsical nature. The sonata reflects the colours inherent in the impressionist style, and draws the listener through by ensuring no idea ever lingers too long. Saint-Saëns, though often considered a slave to traditional structures in comparison to Debussy, actually explored exoticism as early as 1863 in his Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso Op.28. These ideas are continued in the Havanaise, which is underpinned by the Spanish dance habanera rhythm. The clear division of solo and accompaniment between the violin and piano, along with distinct boundaries between sections, make it a more conservative composition than the other works in the programme, but nevertheless it is still a hugely colourful piece, reminiscent of the heat and fire of Spain. Ravel also held a fascination with Spanish idioms, as his mother had Basque and Spanish origins. His Piece en forme de Habanera, originally written for bass voice and piano, is similarly based on the habanera rhythm. The soulful solo line received several arrangements by the composer; here the lightness of the violin, accompanied by the shimmering piano part, evokes the Spanish influence as well as the idea of Orientalism. Ravel’s love of the exotic partly stemmed from his idolisation of Debussy, and is definitely heard in Tzigane. Written concurrently with his first trip to Spain, the title translates as ‘gypsy’, and was written for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi. The wild and intense solo opening reveals an exotic otherness that is developed in the folk melodies which follow. Ravel spins melodies that evoke a gypsy violinist telling a furiously exciting tale of intrigue and mystery. This final work encapsulates all the magic, melancholy and capriciousness inherent in this unique period of composition. Joanna Stark

100

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Rusalka Piano Trio

Late Night Jazz at Kings Place

St Pancras Room 10.00pm Sunday 6 September

St Pancras Room 11.15pm Sunday 6 September

Rusalka Piano Trio Si Chen piano Yuka Ishizuka violin Emily Francis cello

Sam Leak Trio with Stan Sulzmann Sam Leak piano James Opstad bass Dave Hamblett drums

Haydn Trio in D major, Hob.XV No.24 Allegro; Andante; Allegro, ma dolce Ravel Piano Trio in A minor Modéré; Pantoum: assez vif; Passacaille: Très large; Finale: animé

Stan Sulzmann saxophones

Haydn’s Piano Trio No.24 in D belongs to a group of three published by the composer at the end of his second London residency (1794-5). The capital’s vibrant musical and non-musical life reinvigorated a man used to the courtly confines of Esterházy, and his London music is particularly vivid and extrovert, infused with the city and its population. Like most of his piano trios, No.24 was composed for amateurs but, together with its two companions, it is more vigorous and musically nutritious than earlier examples. A practical incentive in this regard was the superior dynamic range and power of English grand pianos which Haydn encountered in the capital – and which is given a showcase in the first movement’s strong opening chord! Although the overall tone of the work is refined, frequent surprises and accents in the first movement, a brooding central movement in D minor and an amiably bi-polar finale (Allegro ma dolce) provide signposts towards the developments of Beethoven, whose trios Op.1 were published in the same year. Ravel began work on his piano trio in the Spring of 1914, inspired by his discovery of Saint-Saëns’ two examples. Work stalled in the summer but the outbreak of war ensured speedy completion in the autumn: Ravel, hoping to enlist, apparently wished to conclude the piece as a farewell to society before a noble death in war! Although it is tempting to hear in the first movement an evocation of the last days of uneasy peace (the piano’s ominous deep restatements of the opening theme perhaps representing the limbering engines of war), the piece is primarily concerned with the compositional challenges presented by various forms and schemes. The main challenge is the trio configuration and the balancing of the three unevenlyweighted instruments, but Ravel also sets himself sub-puzzles: the realisation in musical language of a repetitive Malaysian verse-form called Pantoum in the second movement, and in the third the correct deployment of the early-Baroque passacaglia form.

The Sam Leak Trio score a century tonight, performing our last concert of the festival, No. 100, with the legendary Stan Sulzmann. The Sam Leak Trio will be performing original music by all three members. Sam, a student at the Royal Academy of Music, has played widely throughout the UK, supported Benny Golson at Ronnie Scott's, played at the 2008 Glastonbury Festival and also runs the band Aquarium. Sam performed in a piano duet with John Taylor as part of Stan Sulzmann’s birthday Big Band concert. Sulzmann, one of the most highly respected saxophonists in the UK today and a great inspiration to the younger generation, joins the Trio tonight. Sulzmann’s career stretches back to the Sixties, when he played with John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler and Gordon Beck, as well as leading groups of his own. Since then Stan has been at the forefront of European contemporary jazz, and his talents have been sought by a host of discerning musicians, including Gil Evans, Mike Gibbs, Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland and Michael Brecker. Further intimate and innovative musical partnerships have developed with British pianist Nikki Iles, American keyboard player Marc Copland and the Trio Ordesa, a drumless, bassless combination with Kenny Wheeler and John Parricelli.

Julian Forbes

FESTIVAL CURATORS

IAIN BURNSIDE

Alamire, directed by David Skinner, is made up of some of the finest consort singers in the UK and exists in order to explore and promote the compositional processes behind the great masterworks, and lesser-known works, of the late medieval and early modern periods. The ensemble maintains its own label, Obsidian Records (www. obsidianrecords.co.uk), which is a subsidiary of Classical Communications. They have released CDs of music by Josquin Desprez, Philippe Verdelot, Thomas Tomkins, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to great critical acclaim, with artists such as Fretwork, Andrew Lawrence-King and QuintEssential. Other projects include sound installations for art galleries and soundtracks for television and film. Their Henry’s Music project has received a number of awards, including CD of the Month in Classic FM Magazine and a Gramophone Award nomination for the 2009 Early Music category. David Skinner is known primarily for his combined role as a researcher and performer of early music, is Fellow and Osborn Director of Music at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music. He teaches historical and practical topics from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. From 1997 to 2001 he was a Post-doctoral Fellow of the British Academy at Christ Church, Oxford (where he was a Choral Scholar from 1989 to 1994), and was the Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 2001 to 2006. At Cambridge he conducts the Choir of Sidney Sussex College, with whom he has toured and made professional recordings. He has published widely on music and musicians of early Tudor England - his most recent projects include the collected works of Nicholas Ludford (Early English Church Music, 2003 & 2005) and The Arundel Choirbook (Duke of Norfolk: Roxburghe Club, 2003). He is currently editing the Latin church music of John Sheppard for publication in 2010.

Interweaving roles as pianist and Sony-Awardwinning radio presenter with equal aplomb, Iain Burnside (‘pretty much ideal’ BBC Music Magazine) is also a master programmer with an instinct for the telling juxtaposition. His recordings straddle an exuberantly eclectic repertoire ranging from Schoenberg and Copland to Debussy and Judith Weir, with a special place reserved for the highways and byways of English Song, as his recent acclaimed recordings of Finzi, Vaughan Williams and Ireland (Naxos) and Britten (Signum) have proved. Iain has already appeared several times at Kings Place, and curated his own week of words and music Transformations, which included the brilliant semi-staged evocation of the First World War Lads in their hundreds: ‘in a world of the blindingly obvious, Burnside’s elliptical genius for programming takes the breath away’. He curated and performed two evenings of song in the eightweek Beethoven Unwrapped series, on the back of a project to record two highly-praised volumes of Beethoven songs with Ann Murray, John Mark Ainsley and Roderick Williams (Signum). Other collaborations include those with Lisa Milne, Susan Gritton, Susan Bickley, Mark Padmore and Bryn Terfel. He currently presents Sunday Morning with Iain Burnside on BBC Radio 3.

ALAMIRE

ALISTAIR ANDERSON Alistair Anderson has been at the forefront of traditional music for over three decades. Internationally acknowledged as the master of the English concertina, he has appeared on TV, radio and the concert platform across the world and has recorded and performed with a diverse range of artists, including Kate Bush, the Lindsay String Quartet, Richard Thompson, John Williams, the Northern Sinfonia and Nigel Kennedy. His compositions have involved folk, classical and jazz musicians, and in spring 2008 he composed two pieces for the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. Earlier this year he toured two new pieces with an ensemble featuring violinist, and fellow Kings Place Festival curator, Peter Cropper. A tireless champion and educator for traditional music, Alistair was responsible for setting up England’s first-ever degree course in folk and traditional music at Newcastle University, in collaboration with The Sage Gateshead, and continues to play an active role in its development. He is also the founder and current artistic director of Folkworks, an innovative organisation that helps to bring a new generation into contact with the rich musical heritage of these islands and beyond. Alistair is soon to hand over the direction of Folkworks – which was one of the two founding partners of The Sage Gateshead – to his great friend and fellow Northumbrian, Kathryn Tickell, and he is delighted that she will be joining him here at Kings Place Festival.

FESTIVAL CURATORS ▼

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CLASSICAL OPERA COMPANY

CHILINGIRIAN QUARTET The Chilingirian Quartet has been firmly established as one of the world’s great ensembles for over thirty-five years. Its early success in the European Broadcasting Union competition in Stockholm was followed by a highly-acclaimed debut in New York which paved the way to a distinguished career spanning over 50 countries on all continents. The Royal Philharmonic Society granted its coveted Chamber Ensemble Award to the Quartet. Eagerly sought-after for its spontaneous and authoritative interpretations of classical and romantic works, the Quartet has also had a pioneering role in introducing works by British composers of the twentieth century. The Chilingirian has held residencies at the Universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Irvine (California) and now leads an exciting chamber music programme at London’s Royal College of Music. The Quartet has been quartet-in-residence at the Lake District Summer Music Festival for over 20 years and for 29 years has run its own prestigious summer course at West Dean. An exciting connection has been established with 'El Sistema' in Venezuela where the Chilingirian has been asked to further the chamber music education of these highly talented young players. Among the first musicians to try out the acoustics of Kings Place, the Quartet participated in the opening week’s festivities in October 2008 and gave the world premiere of a specially commissioned work by Thea Musgrave. This appearance was described by the Financial Times as the 'highlight' of the Festival, a 'harmony of voices, talents and temperaments.' Further concerts for the Haydn Bicentenary were performed at Kings Place and Wigmore Hall. The Chilingirian also collaborated with the Hilliard Ensemble in a programme of music for Holy Week by Haydn and Gesualdo, performed in Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Wigmore Hall. Recent additions to their extensive discography are the first volume of Mozart’s complete viola quintets and DVDs of Beethoven’s complete Op. 18 quartets, recorded live during concerts in France.

The Classical Opera Company was founded in 1997 by conductor Ian Page to specialise in the music of Mozart and his contemporaries, and its work ranges from full-scale opera productions to intimate recitals. It appears regularly at such venues as the Barbican, Sadler’s Wells and Wigmore Hall, and in December it will present its third Kings Place residency, ‘Handel in Italy’, which features six of Handel’s greatest Italian cantatas, the Dixit Dominus and two performances of Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. The company has developed an outstanding reputation for the high quality of its performances, for its innovative and imaginative programming and for its ability to discover and nurture worldclass young artists. Singers who have worked with the company at a formative stage of their career have included include Emma Bell, Sophie Bevan, Rebecca Bottone, Allan Clayton, Lucy Crowe, Jacques Imbrailo, Andrew Kennedy, Anna Leese and Sally Matthews. Three years ago the company embarked on the UK’s first ever complete cycle of Mozart operas, and its debut CD, The A-Z of Mozart Opera, which was released on Sony BMG in 2007, was selected as one of Gramophone magazines recordings of the year. Future plans include an eagerly-awaited completion of Mozart’s Zaide, which will be presented at Sadler’s Wells in June 2010. Associate Artist Sophie Bevan and mezzosoprano Sigríður Ósk Kristjánsdóttir have appeared with the Classical Opera Company in numerous concerts at Kings Place, while Thomas Hobbs is in his final year at the Royal Academy of Music, and is making his company debut. Gary Cooper is one of the foremost ambassadors of the fortepiano; his recordings include a recent Haydn solo disc and the award-winning series of Mozart violin sonatas with Rachel Podger.

THE CLERKS One of the outstanding vocal groups in its field, The Clerks’ recordings and performances of Renaissance vocal music have earned them a place among the foremost interpreters of the repertoire. The group’s discography of over 20 CDs represents a uniquely valuable and pioneering contribution to early music and has won them many accolades, including the coveted Gramophone Award for Early Music. The Clerks formed at Oxford University and made its professional London debut in 1992. In recent years the ensemble has expanded its repertoire to include contemporary works. They have performed in the UK’s major venues and festivals, including the BBC Proms, the Barbican and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and regularly appear at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. The Clerks have broadcast in many European countries, and have made programmes for Belgian and French television. Highlights of 2009 include a UK tour of Qudduson, a collaboration with singers from Syria, the release of discs of music by Johannes Regis, and an anthology of contemporary commissions, and the group’s Amsterdam Concertgebouw debut. Edward Wickham is the founder and artistic director of The Clerks, a role which he combines with his duties as Director of Music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and an Affiliate Lecturer at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge. You can keep up with The Clerks at their website: www.theclerks.co.uk

FESTIVAL CURATORS ▼

PETER CROPPER For over 40 years the name Peter Cropper was synonymous with that of the Lindsay Quartet, whose impassioned style and close identification with the quartets of Beethoven (as well as Mozart, Haydn and Schubert) set it in the vanguard of British chamber ensembles. As well as leading the Lindsays Cropper maintained an active solo career which has blossomed since the disbandment of the quartet in 2005. A duo partnership with Martin Roscoe has produced more insightful recordings of Beethoven (the complete violin sonatas), and with Moray Welsh adding cello, Cropper is enthusiastically exploring the piano trio repertoire anew. He has also formed the Ludwig String Trio with Paul Watkins and James Boyd, who recently performed two Beethoven concerts at Kings Place. Peter Cropper is recognised for his imaginative programming. His Sheffield-based ‘Music in the Round’ won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Festival award, and has evolved into a major force not only in the city but UK-wide. He curated the highly successful Haydn in London week at Kings Place, and leads a celebration of Mendelssohn’s chamber music this November. BBC Music Magazine praised ‘Cropper’s passion and intensely focused musicality’.

ENDYMION

THE GUARDIAN

'The brilliant Endymion' (Sunday Times) was formed in 1979 and has built a secure reputation across a broad and often adventurous repertoire. It has won a strong following among audiences throughout the UK and abroad, touring in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Finland and Mexico. It has been called one of the few chamber groups as much at home with Mozart as with Birtwistle. Endymion has made a speciality of 20th century music theatre and small-scale opera, including collaborations with the Royal Opera House’s Garden Venture, Women’s Playhouse Trust and Opera Factory, with which it undertook an extensive European tour of Dido and Aeneas and Curlew River during 1995. Endymion has appeared at most of the major British festivals and performed three times at the Proms. Recent appearances at the Southbank Centre, Kings Place and at the Cheltenham and Spitalfields Festivals have included works by Kurtág, Birtwistle, Simon Holt and Simon Bainbridge, portrait concerts of Peter Maxwell Davies, Steve Martland, Anthony Gilbert and Elisabeth Lutyens. Endymion’s collaborations with the BBC Singers have included world premières of Giles Swayne’s Havoc and Edward Cowie’s Gaia, as well as the UK première of Birtwistle’s Ring Dance of the Nazarene ('startling virtuosity from all concerned' – Daily Telegraph). In June 2009 Endymion celebrated its 30th Birthday at Kings Place with Sound Census. Thirteen performances featured chamber music gems including Brahms, Mendelssohn, Messiaen and Feldman, and premieres of new commissions by 20 British composers, which were recorded for release by NMC. This disc will join a host of other Endymion recordings including discs of Lutyens, Stravinsky, Britten and Magnus Lindberg and (with the Dutton label) York Bowen, Edmund Rubbra, Thomas Dunhill, Lennox Berkeley, Erno Dohnányi and Zdenek Fibich. More information about Endymion and their concerts, and details of how you can support them can be found on their website: www.Endymion.org.uk.

With its passionate commitment to quality journalism, photography and design, The Guardian is arguably the leading English language liberal newspaper in the world. The Guardian’s vision is to offer independent, agenda-setting content that positions it as the modern, vibrant challenger to the status quo. It is consistently innovative, actively encouraging debate and exerting influence. Healthily sceptical, but not cynical, The Guardian is confident, intelligent and investigative. This approach is made possible through the unique ownership structure of the paper. It is owned by the Scott Trust, which reinvests income from other business to ensure that The Guardian remains a progressive voice in a world in which news organisations are increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer multi-national companies. Because the paper is not owned by shareholders, dictated to by a press baron or influenced by a political party, journalists are free to present the truth as they see it. The Trust secures the continuity and editorial independence of the paper, ensuring that it remains without party affiliation, and faithful to the liberal tradition. The Guardian switched to the Berliner format in 2005, going on to be twice named best-designed newspaper in the world. It is the only national daily newspaper in the UK to be published in this innovative format, which combines the portability of a tabloid with the sensibility of a broadsheet. The change has allowed the paper to continue its special brand of journalism while at the same time providing a modern print format for a new generation of readers in this country.

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KINGS PLACE GALLERY

INTERNATIONAL GUITAR FOUNDATION Founded in 1995, the International Guitar Foundation (IGF) is an agency dedicated to the promotion, understanding and enjoyment of the guitar, its music and artists. It is committed to nurturing talent, creating new music and reaching new audiences, as well as providing links between business and the arts. The agency works with a number of partners, including the University of Bath, Real World Records, Womad, Future and Rockschool. The IGF promotes concerts, recitals and festivals all over the country, from the Royal Festival Hall and the Sage Gateshead to schools and youth clubs, and in every field of music, whether classical, blues, flamenco, jazz, world, rock or folk. This series of events as part of Kings Place Festival provides a taster for the forthcoming London Guitar Festival in the Fall, here at Kings Place from 26 October to 2 November. The IGF’s passion for the guitar extends well beyond the concert platform. From primary-school kids to aspiring teenagers, twentysomethings to retired music-lovers, a wide range of people regularly choose to learn with the IGF. Its extensive educational programme includes guitar tuition in schools around the country, a host of seminars and workshops at all levels, and a highly-acclaimed summer school in Bath. The IGF has also commissioned and recorded more ‘serious’ new music for the guitar than any other institution, producing a substantial body of contemporary guitar music. For more information, visit www.igf.org.uk

XENIA JANKOVIC Xenia Jankovic was born into a Serbian-Russian familiy of musicians. Fascinated by the cello, she started to play at the age of six and gave her debut with the Belgrade Philharmonic when she was only nine. Two years later she received a state scholarship to the special school of the Moscow Conservatory and was a pupil of Stefan Kalianov. Further studies were with Pierre Fournier and Guy Fallot in Switzerland and André Navarra in Germany. In 1981, Xenia Jankovic gained international acclaim and recognition as the first price winner of the prestigious Gaspar Cassado Competition in Florence. Close work with Sandor Végh and György Sebök was a source of profound musical and personal inspiration. Xenia Jankovic's solo performances with big orchestras including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Budapest Philharmonic, the Radio Orchestras of Berlin, Copenhagen and Madrid. Her recitals in Paris, London, Berlin and Moscow have been described as deeply moving and unforgettable. As an active chamber musician she played with György Sebök, Gidon Kremer and Andras Schiff; she is regularly invited to international music festivals. Since 2004 she has been Professor of Cello at the Musikhochschule in Detmold.

Bridging the north-south divide Kings Place Gallery is affiliated to Northumbria’s University Gallery (established in 1977) through a joint programme of exhibitions and publications. Forthcoming exhibition highlights include notable photographers Jane Bown and Chris Steele-Perkins, as well as exhibitions of new work by Sophie Benson, Norman Cornish, Stephen Chambers and Alan Davie. As well as establishing a permanent base and annual exhibitions relating to the Ruth Borchard Collection (the extraordinary archive of 100 self-portraits by British artists that Ruth Borchard commissioned in the immediate postwar years) the programme will regularly include exhibitions by contemporary Norwegian artists Nicolaus Widerberg, Frans Widerberg, Kjell Torriset and Ørnulf Opdahl, a group whose recent radical achievements have established audiences worldwide.

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LONDON SINFONIETTA

JOHN METCALFE

The London Sinfonietta is one of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles with a reputation built on the virtuosity of its performances and its ambitious programming. It is committed to placing new music at the heart of contemporary culture and pushing boundaries; regularly undertaking projects with choreographers, video artists, film-makers, electronica artists, jazz and folk musicians. The ensemble is Resident Orchestra at Southbank Centre with regular performances from composer-conductors such as Oliver Knussen (its Conductor Laureate) and George Benjamin, as well as some of the finest interpreters of 20th and 21st century repertoire including Diego Masson, Peter Eötvös and Martyn Brabbins. It continues to take the best contemporary music to venues and festivals throughout the UK and worldwide with a busy touring schedule. The creation of new music has been at the core of the London Sinfonietta’s work since its foundation in 1968. Commissioning almost 250 works and premiering many hundreds more, ranging from Luciano Berio and Harrison Birtwistle to Steve Reich. Its innovative Blue Touch Paper scheme, which has supported new works from Tansy Davies, Dai Fujikura and Anna Meredith, gives composers the opportunity to take risks and develop ideas without the pressure of a public performance. Extending its support of emerging talent, this year the London Sinfonietta launches the new London Sinfonietta Academy that gives young instrumentalists, selected from throughout the UK, the unparalleled experience of working and performing with some of the finest contemporary musicians in the world. The London Sinfonietta has its headquarters at Kings Place where it is developing another strand of its programme for London and UK touring. Visit our website to download and stream exclusive interviews, music, film and biographies and sign up to receive all the latest information. www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk London Sinfonietta performs with the support of Arts Council England.

From his early days in New Zealand listening to his father sing opera, John Metcalfe has become one the most exciting and versatile musicians working in the UK today. Whether giving string quartet recitals in venues worldwide, composing for radio and TV, writing string arrangements for No.1 UK pop hits or releasing his own genre-defying music, John has gained wide recognition for his unique brand of music-making. Moving to England, he took up the viola at the age of ten and joined his first band at school playing drums. An early love of Joy Division influenced his move to Manchester where he joined cult band The Durutti Column on the legendary Factory label. He stayed for three years, adding his own unique sound to the enigmatic style of guitarist Vini Reilly. Hard classical study continued, together with scholarships that took him to London and Berlin, where he studied with Bruno Giuranna. His distaste for classical recording industry practices led him to persuade Factory boss Tony Wilson to launch the ground-breaking Factory Classical label, aimed at bringing young British talent and music to a truly new audience. In the meantime, Metcalfe’s strength as a string composer for bands came to the fore, notably with his work on Morrissey’s No.1 album Viva Hate. John’s debut solo album, The Inner Line, was received with glowing reviews. Billboard Magazine described it as: ‘The ideal item for classical fans wanting to investigate a pop-leaning, contemporary sound world or for electronica fans who crave far more musicality than they’re used to.’ His latest release, Scorching Bay, epitomises a sound that is currently dissolving boundaries between modern classical and electronic music. With influences as diverse as Schoenberg, drum’n’bass, Bach and Brian Eno, it offers a sound world that is seductive, wistful, beautiful and hugely powerful.

COLIN MATTHEWS Colin Matthews was born in London in 1946. He studied at the Universities of Nottingham, and Sussex, where he also taught, and subsequently worked with Britten in Aldeburgh from 1972-6, and with Imogen Holst. He collaborated with Deryck Cooke for many years on the performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Since the early 1970s his music has ranged from solo piano music through three string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works, with recordings on major labels. From 1992-9 he was Associate Composer with the London Symphony Orchestra, writing amongst other works a Cello Concerto for Rostropovich. In 1997 his choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned for the 50th anniversary of BBC Radio 3, was given the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for large-scale composition. In 2000 his ballet score Hidden Variables opened the Royal Ballet’s season, and the large-scale ensemble piece Continuum was toured in Europe by the BCMG and Simon Rattle. Recent works include Reflected Images for the San Francisco SO, Berceuse for Dresden for the New York Philharmonic and Turning Point for the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He is currently Composerin-Association with the Hallé, for whom he has recently completed his orchestrations of Debussy’s 24 Preludes, now recorded on the Hallé label. Current commissions include works for the London Sinfonietta and BBC Symphony Orchestra and a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He is founder and Executive Producer of NMC Recordings and curated the NMC Songbook concerts at Kings Place in April 2009.

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MUSIKÉ

2009 is the 10th anniversary of Musiké. It was created by Jean-Bernard Pommier (supported by friends and colleagues world-wide) in order to give young professional musicians a greater understanding of the interaction between creative artistic integrity and the richness of human intellectual and spiritual life. It links what it is to be a musician with what it is to be human. Musiké brings together senior performers, who are themselves links back into the artistic approach of great musicians of the early 20th century, with young artists who wish to share their approach. Musiké exists to speak of the integrity of music and (in ways not unlike those of other authentic performance movements) to reawaken an awareness of the performance styles and approaches to the score of great artists of the Romantic past. Musiké is therefore about performance, not about pedagogy. While it does from time to time conduct masterclasses (indeed, Jean-Bernard Pommier has been holding master classes on the Beethoven piano sonatas here in Kings Place for the past year) it is fundamentally in the interaction of young instrumentalists with old in actual performance that it realises its aim. So this year our performers have been working together in Durham and giving concerts there to lead into these performances at Kings Place. We believe that this emphasis is unique in the UK and take great pleasure in sharing our 10th birthday with the first birthday of Kings Place. We welcome you all most warmly to the Musiké Kings Place concerts 2009. To keep in touch with Musiké, please see our website : www.musike.co.uk

ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

DAVID MURPHY The curator of Indian Legends and founder and artistic director of Sinfonia ViVa, David Murphy is one of the most artistically adventurous conductors working today. He began his musical studies as a violinist at the Guildhall School of Music before going on to study conducting in the US and with Leon Barzin in Paris. Two other legendary mentors were subsequently central to his development as a musician – the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras and the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. Inspired by this unique blend of very potent influences, David has pioneered a series of projects aiming to tap into the common roots of Indian and western music. Combining western orchestras with the world’s leading Indian musicians, these exciting musical explorations are creating a new repertoire and indeed a new musical genre. David’s recent cross-cultural collaborations have included concerts with the London Sinfonietta and Sinfonia ViVa, and the world premiere of a new symphony by Ravi Shankar, which he conducted at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In February 2009 he toured India with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, contrasting works by Mozart and Beethoven with Samagam, a new work created with the legendary sarod player Amjad Ali Khan. ‘One of the most talented conductors I have ever worked with, he has the passion, intellect and artistic ability to take the lead of an orchestra and bring it to great heights. David Murphy is on his way to becoming one of the most important conductors of our time.’ Leon Barzin

It’s 1986. For some ten years there has existed a core of baroque instrumentalists who have played for bands run by pioneers like Christopher Hogwood, Trevor Pinnock, Roger Norrington. They’ve transformed music-making. We’re no longer over-reverential with our Bach or Mozart but find in them new colours, new expressivity, new energies. And then a revolution. A group of players forms a self-governing orchestra. They settle on a name which reflects both the period of much of the music they play and the ethos of discovery. There will be no single conductor. Instead, conductors or directors from violins or keyboards will be appointed on a concert-by-concert basis, and not necessarily on the basis of experience with periodstyle instuments. Quickly the OAE is recognised as special, its playing charged with vibrancy and energy. It removes period-style performance practice from the fringes of music-making, placing it instead at the heart of the musical world. More than two decades on, the OAE is regarded as one of the world’s great orchestras. It’s a Resident Orchestra at London’s Southbank Centre, Associate Orchestra at Glyndebourne, and now plays regularly at its new Headquarters at Kings Place, London, as well as enjoying a residency across the South West of England. Iván Fischer, Vladimir Jurowski and Sir Simon Rattle are Principal Artists, and Frans Bruggen, Sir Roger Norrington, and Sir Charles Mackerras are Conductors Emeritus. It tours regularly to Europe and beyond. And its three-part Futures developmental programme, Future Orchestra, Future Performers and Future Audiences (which embraces The Night Shift series of informal late night concerts), will surely ensure that it continues to thrill audiences for decades to come. Stephen Pettitt

FESTIVAL CURATORS ▼

PANGOLIN LONDON

RED ORANGE

Pangolin London is one of the capital’s few galleries entirely dedicated to sculpture. Highlighting both emerging and established artists, the gallery offers a diverse and varied exhibition programme, featuring notable 20th-century British sculptors such as Lynn Chadwick, Peter Randall-Page, William Tucker and Ann Christopher, as well as many younger contemporary artists. Pangolin London’s unique affiliation with Europe’s largest sculpture foundry, Pangolin Editions, sets it apart from other commercial galleries. Not only does this relationship allow the gallery to commission unusual exhibitions but it also enables it to encourage artists to push the boundaries of their work and experiment with different materials and processes. In addition to the exhibitions in the gallery space, Pangolin London also curates the sculpture located throughout the public spaces at Kings Place. Showing a rotating programme of around 20 largescale works, this sculpture trail offers an excellent metropolitan alternative to the rural sculpture park.

Red Orange is a London-based audience and artist development agency. Its work involves consultancy, curatorship, management, marketing, broadcasting, live events production and touring. It is a leading force in forward-thinking music, dance and performance art, combining an extended network of partners in order to promote some of the most exciting, innovative and inspiring artists from all corners of the world. Red Orange is a catalyst for change, showcasing excellence and excitement, instigating international collaborations and experimentation, enthusing inter-culturalism and the sharing of knowledge. Red Orange is also responsible for LIFEM (London International Festival of Exploratory Music), a festival of inspired and boundaryexpanding music explorations from all over the world. Where else can you see UK minimalist avant chamber pop; Inuk snow songs, ice folk and throat singing from Canada and Greenland; old and new world music from Ireland, Turkey, Iraq and China; the newest electro-Latin sounds from Brazil; Yiddish, Sephardic and klezmer music from Israel, Serbia and Poland; and exquisite organic electronica from Japan? LIFEM 09 takes place from 4 to 7 November here at Kings Place. Miguel Santos, the creative director behind Red Orange, was director of the Atlantic Waves Festival, which took place in London between 2001 and 2008, and compiled the album series Exploratory Music from Portugal, which was distributed with Songlines and The Wire magazines. He also presents a number of shows on Londonbased ‘radio art station’ Resonance FM. For more information on Red Orange range of activities, visit: www.redorange.org.uk

POET IN THE CITY Poet in the City is a charity committed to creating new audiences and connections for poetry. It also raises money to support poetry education, in particular the placing of poets in schools. The New Audiences committee plays an important part in the charity’s work, reaching out to those who have not previously regarded themselves as poetry fans, and actively creating platforms for new contemporary poets. You can find out more about the charity at www.poetinthecity.co.uk Voice Recognition is edited by James Byrne and Clare Pollard and is published by Bloodaxe Books priced £9.95. For more information, go to www.bloodaxebooks.com Words Converge is part of Creative Collaboration, a British Council arts initiative to build networks for dialogue and debate across the arts communities of southeast Europe and the UK. Managed in the UK by Poet in the City, it also involves partner organisations in Romania, Greece, Georgia and Israel. For more information about this exciting international public art project, visit www.britishcouncil.org/creativecollaboration

▼ FESTIVAL CURATORS

CHRISTOPH RICHTER After his studies with André Navarra and Pierre Fournier, Christoph Richter was principal cellist of the Northern Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Günter Wand. An intense collaboration with Sandor Végh and prizes at international competitions such as Paris (Rostropovich) and Geneva led him to the decision to leave the orchestra. He became professor at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen (Germany), was member of the Cherubini Quartet and played as soloist with many leading orchestras (including Munich and Czech Philharmonic, premiering a new work by Henze at the Salzburg Festival). In 2004 he founded the Heine Quartet, with whom he recorded a CD with works of Brahms and Janácˇek, which became CD of the month by the The Strad in London. His strong interest in contemporary music has led him to work with composers such as Penderecki, Kurtág, Henze, Lachenmann, Holliger, Reimann and Widmann. In spring 2009 ECM released his recording of works by Schumann and Holliger with pianist Dénés Varjon. A second CD with the entire works by Brahms and Webern as well for ECM is planned. Upcoming concerts include the Schumann Cello Concerto at the Musikverein in Vienna, projects with the Camerata Bern, and chamber music concerts with Andras Schiff, Isabelle Faust, Levon Chilingirian in London, Milan, Bern, Salzburg and Berlin. He is a faculty member of the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA) since its foundation in 2004 and regularly teaches at the Menuhin Academy in Switzerland and at the London String Quartet Foundation. He gives master classes all over the world. He has sat on the juries of the Haydn competition in Vienna, the Joachim competition in Weimar, the London String Quartet Competition and the Trondheim Competition in Norway. Christoph Richter has made solo and chamber music recordings for the labels EMI, ECM, Naxos, Tudor, cpo, Wergo and Genuin. www.christoph-richter.com

ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

SERIOUS

Since 1822, the Royal Academy of Music, Britain’s senior music college, has prepared students for a successful career in music according to the evolving demands of the profession. Amongst the Academy’s most distinguished living alumni are Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Dankworth, Lesley Garrett, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Sir Elton John, Graham Johnson, Philip Langridge, Annie Lennox, Dame Felicity Lott, Joanna MacGregor, Nicholas Maw, Michael Nyman, Sir Simon Rattle and Jean Rigby. Alumni from previous generations include Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Henry Wood, Dame Myra Hess, Dame Eva Turner, Dennis Brain, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Clifford Curzon and Dame Moura Lympany. Recent graduates who have already made significant impact on the music profession and related media include the new musical director of English National Opera Edward Gardner, chart-topping soprano Katherine Jenkins, and singer/pianist Myleene Klass. Teaching staff are distinguished musicians, active at the very top of their professions. The Academy’s students, who make up a vibrant community in which over 50 countries are represented, follow diverse programmes which range from performance to composition, jazz, media, musical theatre and Royal Academy Opera, a specialist postgraduate course. The only music college boasting membership of the University of London, the Academy offers training from undergraduate BMus to Doctorate level. The Academy enjoys a highly enviable location alongside Regent’s Park in central London. Our internationally-significant museum and research centre houses exhibits from the Academy’s superb collection of instruments, original manuscripts and items from the working collections of famous musicians. For more information see: www.ram.ac.uk

Serious is an established innovator, with a track record of producing ambitious and criticallyacclaimed live jazz, international and new music events. It acts as a catalyst, creating the conditions to inspire diverse artists and audiences, and shaping unforgettable experiences. Working with musicians from across the world, Serious presents and produces a huge variety of concerts, tours, special events and festivals. Its work as a creative producer covers two main areas – producing its own events, and using its skills to meet the needs of partners such as Youth Music, the BBC and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. The company’s passion for music also extends well beyond the concert hall. Publishing group In All Seriousness leads the way in supporting innovative composers working in the areas of jazz, world and new music. And an extensive learning and participation programme provides audiences with a host of opportunities to take an active part in music making.

FESTIVAL CURATORS ▼

SOUND AND MUSIC Sound and Music is one of the UK’s leading agencies for new and experimental music. Working in partnership with complementary organisations, it raises awareness of this vital and inspiring art form through a range of performances, tours and regular festivals such as The Cutting Edge, Fertilizer, the Sound Source and Expo. The agency brings together practitioners, producers and promoters under one roof, with the aim of attracting bigger and more diverse audiences to engage with innovative and sometimes challenging work. Above all, Sound and Music is committed to giving as many people as possible access to its work. Spanning the spectrum of musical experience – from young people’s first encounters with music to the support and development of professional artists — it organises a broad programme of initiatives to create opportunities to discover, learn and create. Sound and Music also believes passionately that the more you know about what you’re listening to, the more you’ll get out of the experience. Its extensive resources range from preevent information, articles and related material to a collection of 40 years’ worth of archive scores and recordings by modern British composers. The hub for all these activities and events is soundandmusic.org, which brings together a huge network of artists, publishers, promoters and music fans, as well as providing a social space – the SAM Network. Whether creating your own profile, bookmarking audio and visual links, or searching the most comprehensive listings in the UK, soundandmusic.org is a new place to share, learn and create – a kind of virtual venue for music and sound in the UK.

THE SPITZ

TWISTED LOUNGE

The Spitz, housed in the old Spitalfields Market, was one of London’s best known and most loved music venues. It was forced to shut its doors in 2007 because of the ‘development’ of the market. But two years on, The Spitz is very much alive and kicking, presenting concerts at venues across the capital. The Spitz began life in 1996 with the aim of regenerating a then neglected part of London. Situated between the City and the East End, it quickly gained a reputation for presenting consistently high quality concerts, and became a favourite haunt of artists such as Talvin Singh, PJ Harvey and Damon Albarn. As the millennium dawned, Goldfrapp and Cat Power made early appearances, while regular performances from groups like The Tiger Lillies kept the venue from straying too far away from its alternative roots. The Spitz also became known for its annual blues, folk and One Man Band festivals, and for its contribution to the London Jazz Festival. As The Spitz grew, so did the East End, with the neighbourhoods of Hoxton, Shoreditch and Brick Lane becoming an essential part of London’s nightlife. The Spitz remained a constant, offering an eclectic mix of music from all genres. As the developers moved in, over 10,000 people signed a petition demanding The Spitz stay. It moved on with dignity, with a final concert of jazz greats providing a suitably rousing send off. ‘Bowed but not defeated’ was Time Out’s well-judged epitaph. For those of you who missed out on The Spitz experience, our mini Festival of Blues and series of free atrium concerts will give you a small taste of this much-missed venue’s indefinable magic. www.spitz.co.uk

Leon Michener Leon Michener explores experimental structured improvisation and its links with classical composition. He studied under pianist John Bingham and has performed with Evan Parker, Julie Tippetts, Tony Marsh, Neil Metcalf and tabla player Shivshanker Array. His debut solo album, Imaginary Landscape, which features works by Xenakis, Cage, Scelsi and Ives, was met with critical acclaim. Members of his vocal group Glossalia recently supported Holger Czukay – from experimental German group Can – for the Roundhouse’s Short Circuit festival. For more information, visit www.leonmichener.com David Toop David Toop is a musician, composer, writer and curator. His first album, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975, and since 1995 he has released eight solo albums. Musicians he has worked with include Max Eastley, Evan Parker, Talvin Singh and Ivor Cutler. He has written four books: Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica (winner of an American Book Award in 2000) and Haunted Weather. He has recently finished writing his fifth book, Sinister Resonance: Listening to the Uncanny, and is currently composing a chamber opera, Star-shaped Biscuit, for Aldeburgh Music. For more information, visit www.davidtoop.com Melanie Abrahams and Tilt Melanie Abrahams is a producer and founder of the artist management and production companies renaissance one and Tilt. She has toured artists across Europe and was the producer of Modern Love, a spoken word piece that was nominated for an EMMA Award for Best Play/Theatre Production. Tilt opens up new spaces for spoken word, and its links to music, performance and visual expression. Since 2005, the company has produced events featuring talents such as Sophie Woolley, Michael Horovitz, Patience Agbabi and Jamaican dub artist Mutabaruka. It hosts the spoken word party London Liming. For more information, visit www.renaissanceone.co.uk

EXHIBITIONS

IAN McKEEVER

IN THE MIX II

Temple Paintings KINGS PLACE GALLERY 4 September – 17 October

An Exhibition of Sculpture, Prints and Drawings PANGOLIN LONDON 24 July – 6 September

Ian McKeever – Temple Paintings marks the first time this group of monumental paintings is exhibited in the UK. Executed between 2004-2006, the Temple Paintings have previously been shown in Denmark and in Germany, and will be exhibited at Kings Place along with a series of related works on paper. Ian McKeever has developed a pictorial language which is unique in British painting. It has brought him considerable international acclaim while simultaneously setting him apart from his peers and defying neat categorization. The impetus for this series of paintings arose from McKeever’s visit to China in 2004, and the profound impact that the traditional Buddhist temples had on the artist, in particular, the disjunction between the heavy physical architecture of the temples and their ostensible role as places of the spirit. The Temple Paintings reveal McKeever’s continuing interest in exploring a visual language that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, as Marjorie AllthorpeGuyton writes in the 2009 essay on McKeever, ‘The Temple Paintings are concerned first and foremost with painting and within that endeavour the expression of fullness – of experience and consciousness.’ McKeever’s work is represented in numerous collections including the Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. A major monograph, Ian McKeever Paintings has been published by Lund Humphries to coincide with the opening of the exhibition. This is the first in-depth overview of the artist’s work, and includes essays by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Michael Tucker, and Catherine Lampert. A prolific writer, the artist’s own words also feature in this thorough analysis of his work. Ian McKeever will be in conversation with one of the authors, Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, during the Kings Place Festival, on Sunday 6th September at 12.30pm.

Back due to popular demand, In the Mix II presents a vibrant and eclectic collection of contemporary and modern sculpture from a diverse collection of artists. Ranging from the idiosyncratic work of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi to the graceful mobiles of Daniel Chadwick, from the emotionally powerful works by Ugandan artist Peter Oloya to the delicate forms of Almuth Tebbenhoff, In the Mix II aims to offer visitors an insight into the diversity of sculpture. With the subject matter as broad-ranging as the media and prices, there is undoubtedly something here for everyone. The exhibition also includes a number of fabulous prints and drawings. Prices start at £250 including VAT.

previous page: Ian McKeever, Temple Painting 2005–06 Oil and acrylic on linen 270 x 420cm

opposite, clockwise from top left: Eduardo Paolozzi, Vulcan Almuth Tebbenhoff, Empty Spheres Michael Cooper, Seated Gorilla Ann Christopher, Silent Line all photographs © Steve Russell

EAMONN McCABE Kings Place Opening Festival 08 CONCERT LEVEL 4 September – 17 October To photograph a hundred concerts in five days was a pretty daunting task and it is hard to believe that it was already a year ago. Rather than shoot pictures of the performers on stage I decided to set up a small studio in the bowels of Kings Place and, with the help of some great production assistants, managed to get most of the stars of the first festival to my little hideaway. As there were a few groups in the festival, it would have been hard to get good photographs of them together, as they would have been spread all over the stage. But the trouble with groups is they have their own dynamic and when some of them turned up they were often high on the adrenalin of performing, so it took some directing to get them to pose for the camera. I wanted to make very stylised photographs, with the musicians holding their instruments as though they were valuable tools… which of course they are. I wanted one background in all the photographs to give the exhibition a sense of continuity and chose black and white film because colour often gets in the way of the emotion of a photograph. Classical music is a serious business and black and white looks more serious. Many photographs were taken after midnight and it was with great relief when some of these wonderful musicians and singers turned up and agreed to be recorded for this year's exhibition and not disappear to the comfort of the bar. In some photographs, the performers seem to have a genuine feeling of affection for each other, a real sense of warmth and understanding, and this might just be the secret of a great performance.

above: Clio Gould, Leader, London Sinfonietta right: Matthew Barley opposite: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies all images © Eamonn McCabe 2008

▼ KINGS PLACE MUSIC FOUNDATION

2008 – 2009

Kings Place Music Foundation – One Year On The Foundation has also been involved in a drawing project with the Visual Learning Foundation, focused on music and buildings, whose results have been displayed in the building. A second display is to come, and during this Festival audiences will be able to see pieces by local children who have been working with the resident sculptor at Kings Place, Abigail Fallis. Kings Place has also joined forces with the Mary Ward Centre for an exciting recycling project: students on the Professional Practice for Artists Course are designing and producing bags, book covers, and cards to be made from the banners hanging outside the building, which will be sold from Kings Place Gallery. Future plans include the recruitment of Creative Apprentices from the local area in conjunction with City & Islington College, young people who will benefit from a year of hands-on technical and operations work in this unique arts centre. A packed 13-week autumn season gets underway on 9 September, including a new Monday contemporary music programme Out Hear, paintings by Ian McKeever and sculpture by Lynn Chadwick. What are Millican’s dreams for the future? ‘We’d like to build audiences, of course, and we’re experimenting with the 45-minute concerts, which were so popular at our opening festival. We’ll certainly be doing more European jazz in the future, and we are forming a relationship with De Singel arts centre in Antwerp: it’ll be interesting to exchange ideas. I’m really excited by Matthew Barley’s Extreme Cello (23 – 26 Sept) and video artist Netia Jones’s Transition Projects (9 – 12 Dec) – you won’t see these events anywhere else this autumn, so come along down!’ Peter Millican CEO, Kings Place Music Foundation

The haunting call of an ice trumpet in a darkened room. 70 fiddlers spontaneously jamming in the atrium; Haydn’s London Trios brought exuberantly to life on a Sunday morning; the sound of a Ugandan rock gong, school children aboard the Tarporley narrow-boat... Snap-shots from an extraordinary year at Kings Place, London’s newest music and arts venue. CEO Peter Millican is still digesting the rich mix: ‘We’ve had a very catholic programme this year. Highlights for me were the Paris Jazz week, it had such a strong line-up, the Norwegian fortnight was extraordinary, the eight-week Beethoven series tremendously successful and I loved the Schubert Ensemble’s week on Fauré: they went into real depth, and that’s what Kings Place is all about. We want to build strong weeks that explore a subject in depth.’ Kings Place launched from a position of strength with its resident groups the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. But Millican is pleased to witness the growth of new audiences: ‘We are definitely building a range of different audiences. Every Sunday we’ve seen a steady increase in attendance at the London Chamber Music Society concerts, which is rewarding. Our Guardian spoken word events have been very popular on Mondays too.’ He notes that 200 people have already been to more than 10 concerts: ‘The intention is to build the sort of relationship with our audience where they end up feeling it’s a home – they can eat, hear music and see art here. ' And part of that audience is very young. For the programme of concerts is only the more visible side of the Kings Place Music Foundation, set up as a charity to run the music events, and build an outreach programme that links into the community around King’s Cross and Islington. Together with the resident ensembles, the gallery and Pangolin London, KPMF has already involved over twenty local schools. ‘The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment has been particularly active on this front, led by the amazingly enthusiastic Cherry Forbes,’ says Millican, ‘They have set up a string orchestra, fed from local schools, which has rehearsed and performed here with the OAE. The idea is to start with seven year-olds and take them right up to late teens, and build a unique youth orchestra with an awareness of historical style. We’ve had 400 children in Hall One on six Friday afternoons, listening to the OAE, which they’ve found very exciting, plus a huge range of concerts for schools and workshops by the Endymion Ensemble, London Sinfonietta and the Classical Opera Company.’

▼ FESTIVAL FOOD AND DRINK

FESTIVAL FOOD AND DRINK ▼ Battlebridge

Room Festival Café open from noon to 9pm ▼ Green & Fortune atrium café open from 8am to 10pm ▼ Rotunda Restaurant waterside restaurant open from 9am to midnight ▼ Hog Roast on the Terrace noon to 2pm and 6pm to 8pm 92

▼ FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

Each day of the Festival opens at 9.00am with musicians performing John Cage’s extraordinary Music for Amplified Toy Pianos at Gallery Level (FREE performance). NUMBER

MORNING AFTERNOON EVENING ALL TICKETS £4.50 ONLINE www.kingsplace.co.uk

TIME

SPACE

EVENT

GENRE

1 2 3

9.30am Hall One 10.45am Hall One 12.00noon Hall One

4 5 6

9.45am Hall Two 11.00am Hall Two 12.15pm Hall Two

7 8 9

10.00am St Pancras Room 11.15am St Pancras Room 12.30pm St Pancras Room

Christoph Richter – Mendelssohn Plus ... Mendelssohn plus Bach – St Matthew Passion Mendelssohn plus Schumann – Fantasiestücke/Liederkreis Mendelssohn plus Brahms – Sonatas and Songs Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Education Sing out loud – Start the new term with a vocal workshop Musicians on call – Enjoy music in a relaxed setting Music with the OAE – Sing, Listen and Explore Meet the Journalist – Behind the Scenes at The Guardian Paul Johnson, Deputy Editor, Guardian News and Media – Secrets of the story Melissa Denes, Arts Editor, Guardian – Secrets of the story Patrick Barkham, Feature Writer, Guardian – Secrets of the story

10 11 12

2.15pm 3.30pm 4.45pm

Hall One Hall One Hall One

Endymion Ensemble – Moscow to London Stravinsky, Khachaturian & Venables – Including The Soldier’s Tale Dark Reflections: Brahms & Debussy Central Europe: Dohnányi and Martinu°

13 14 15

2.30pm 3.45pm 5.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

16 17 18

2.45pm 4.00pm 5.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

19 20 21 22

7.00pm 8.15pm 9.30pm 10.45pm

Hall One Hall One Hall One Hall One

23 24 25 26

7.15pm 8.30pm 9.45pm 11.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

27 28 29 30

7.30pm 8.45pm 10.00pm 11.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

T T T

C C C T T T

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Essence of Enlightenment Classical Wind – Mozart, Rossini and more The Band of Oboes – Music from 17th/18th-century oboe bands Baroque Strings – Corelli, Purcell and More Romantic Brass – Late Romantic brass quintets Alistair Anderson – Traditional Folk Innovators Chris Wood – Songs from Southern England Alistair Anderson with Kathryn Tickell and Peter Cropper Kathryn Tickell and Peter Tickell – Pipes and Fiddle Brian Finnegan – dynamic Irish flute player Spitz Blues John Crampton – A one-man blues explosion Tom Rodwell – House wrecking blues and spirituals Sister Mary and the Choir Boys – Unapologetic blues Parbench plays the Blues – Timelessly stylish blues

C C C C F F F F J J J J

FREE EVENTS

Free jazz and choral concerts will be taking place throughout the weekend in the Atrium and at Gallery Level. Simply turn up and enjoy!

GENRE CODE

C Classical CC Contemporary Classical Co Contemporary

Folk Jazz Voice

Fa Fa Fa

CC CC CC

Musiké and Merchant Quartet Borodin and Mozart – Piano and Strings Poulenc, Bruch, Britten – Piano, Oboe and Strings Schubert and Fauré – Piano and Strings Meet the Composer – David Skinner interviews... Robert Saxton, Oxford University Christopher Fox, Brunel University Simon Bainbridge, Royal Academy of Music

F J V

C C C

Fa T W

Family Talk World

▼ FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

SATURDAY 5 SEPTEMBER

Each day of the Festival opens at 9.00am with musicians performing John Cage’s extraordinary Music for Amplified Toy Pianos at Gallery Level (FREE performance).

31 32 33

9.30am Hall One 10.45am Hall One 12.00noon Hall One

34 35 36

9.45am Hall Two 11.00am Hall Two 12.15pm Hall Two

37 38 39

10.00am St Pancras Room 11.15am St Pancras Room 12.30pm St Pancras Room

40 41 42

12.30pm 1.30pm 2.30pm

Atrium Free Atrium Free Atrium Free

43 44 45

2.15pm 3.30pm 4.45pm

Hall One Hall One Hall One

46 47 48

2.30pm 3.45pm 5.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

49 50 51

2.45pm 4.00pm 5.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

52 53

5.15pm 6.45pm

Atrium Free Atrium Free

54 55 56 57

7.00pm 8.15pm 9.30pm 10.45pm

Hall One Hall One Hall One Hall One

58 59 60 61

7.15pm 8.30pm 9.45pm 11.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

62 63 64 65

7.30pm 8.45pm 10.00pm 11.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

EVENT

Musiké and Merchant Quartet Dvorˇák – Piano Quintet Dorati and R. Strauss – Piano, Oboe and Strings Elgar – Piano Quintet International Guitar Festival Soufian Saihi – Moroccan oud player Ahmed Dickinson Cardenas – Cuban Music by Nico Rojas Ensemble Futur’ – Django modern gypsy jazz project OAE Kids – Shake, Rattle and Roll Roll – Creative music workshop for under twos Shake – Creative music workshop for two and three year olds Rattle – Creative music workshop for four and five year olds Alamire – Henry’s Legacy: Thomas Tallis and William Byrd Henry VIII & John Taverner Edward VI & the Wanley Partbooks England’s ‘Golden Age’ of church music Classical Opera Company – Classical Love Songs Mozart’s Burnt Love Letters Haydn’s Piercing Eyes Beethoven’s Kiss John Metcalfe presents... Music for the Afterlight Ted Barnes – Classical/Folk/Americana The Leisure Society – Acoustic/Folk Rock Clayhill – Acoustic/Electronica Voice Recognition from Poet in the City Myth and Family Tales of the City Modern Love Spitz presents... Maya Jobarteh Trio: African Classical Music Spitz Jazz Collective     David Murphy – Indian Legends: An Evening with Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan Ayaan Ali Khan performs Raga Lalita Gauri Amaan Ali Khan performs Raga Desh Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan perform Raga Bageshwari Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan perform Raga Kirwani with Raga Mala London Sinfonietta – Classical and Experimental Claude Debussy and Toru Takemitsu Luciano Berio – Sequenzas and Duets Colin Matthews and Dai Fujikura Richard Barrett and Larry Goves Red Orange – New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments Max Eastley – Sound sculptor and painter Victor Gama – Designer of innovative musical instruments Rafael Toral – Post-Free Jazz Electronic Music Z’EV – American Text Sound Artist

GENRE

C C C W W J Fa Fa Fa

V V V C C C F F F T T T

MORNING

SPACE

AFTERNOON

TIME

J J W W W W CC CC CC CC CC W J CC

EVENING

NUMBER

ALL TICKETS £4.50 ONLINE www.kingsplace.co.uk

▼ FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

SUNDAY 6 SEPTEMBER

Each day of the Festival opens at 9.00am with musicians performing John Cage’s extraordinary Music for Amplified Toy Pianos at Gallery Level (FREE performance). NUMBER

MORNING AFTERNOON EVENING ALL TICKETS £4.50 ONLINE www.kingsplace.co.uk

TIME

SPACE

66 67 68

9.30am Hall One 10.45am Hall One 12.00noon Hall One

69 70 71

9.45am Hall Two 11.00am Hall Two 12.15pm Hall Two

72 73 74

10.00am St Pancras Room 11.15am St Pancras Room 12.30pm St Pancras Room

75 76 77

12.30pm 1.30pm 2.30pm

Atrium Free Atrium Free Atrium Free

78 79 80

2.15pm 3.30pm 4.45pm

Hall One Hall One Hall One

81 82 83

2.30pm 3.45pm 5.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

84 85 86

2.45pm 4.00pm 5.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

87 88

5.15pm 6.45pm

Atrium Free Atrium Free

89 90

7.00pm 8.15pm

Hall One Hall One

91 92

9.30pm Hall One 10.45pm Hall One

93 94 95 96

7.15pm 8.30pm 9.45pm 11.00pm

Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two Hall Two

97 98 99 100

7.30pm 8.45pm 10.00pm 11.15pm

St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room St Pancras Room

EVENT

GENRE

Peter Cropper and Martin Roscoe – Major and Minor Schubert and Brahms – Sonatina/Sonata in G Schubert and Brahms – Sonatina/Sonata in A Schubert and Brahms – Sonatina/Sonata in D Xenia Jankovic – Music-image-imagination Clara Schumann and... Smyth, Stefanovic Debussy and Shostakovich Stravinsky & Prokofiev Meet the Artist Sculptor Jon Buck in conversation with Rungwe Kingdon Art, Junk & The Environment – Exploring the sculpture of Abigail Fallis Ian McKeever in conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton The Clerks Songbook Five Steps to Heaven Ten Songs to Hear Before You Die Twenty Ways to Improve Your Life Colin Matthews – Works for Wind Schumann/Britten/Matthews –clarinet & piano Schumann/Britten/Matthews – oboe & piano Schumann/Britten/Matthews – horn, tenor & piano Sound and Music presents notes inégales Shuffle I: Postcards Shuffle II: Christian Marclay’s Shuffle Earth and Stars Twisted Lounge presents... The Paine of Pleasure: A musical schizoid fantasy. Curated by Leon Michener Sinister Resonance: An uncanny encounter with sound. Curated by David Toop TILT’s ‘London Liming’: Carnival meets spoken word. Curated by Melanie Abrahams Spitz presents... Téa Hodžic Trio – Balkan Vocals and Instrumental    Spitz Jazz Collective Chilingirian Quartet La Serenissima – Britten and Mozart Sad Premonitions and Happy Endings – Bartók and Haydn Iain Burnside & Friends Ivor Gurney – Poet and Composer Late Night Lovesongs – Finzi, Grainger, Geoffrey Poole and Tariq O’Regan In All Seriousness... Max de Wardener – Experimental/Contemporary Jason Yarde – Jazz/Experimental Andy Sheppard – Jazz/Experimental Sebastian Rochford – Experimental/Contemporary Royal Academy of Music at Kings Place Benjamin Grosvenor – Piano The French Violin Ravel Piano Trio Sam Leak Trio with Stan Sulzmann

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Autumn Season Preview EISENSTADT HAYDN TRIO 9 – 13 SEPT ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT 17 – 19 SEPT MATTHEW BARLEY – Extreme Cello 23 – 26 SEPT LONDON SINFONIETTA 1 – 3 OCT JOHN METCALFE – Beyond the Loop 7 – 10 OCT CHILINGIRIAN QUARTET 14 – 17 OCT GUARDIAN HAY FESTIVAL 23 – 25 OCT INTERNATIONAL GUITAR FOUNDATION 28 – 31 OCT RED ORANGE – LIFEM 09 4 – 7 NOV ALDEBURGH Highlights 11 – 14 NOV LONDON JAZZ FESTIVAL 18 – 21 NOV PETER CROPPER – Mendelssohn 25 – 29 NOV CLASSICAL OPERA COMPANY 2 – 5 DEC TRANSITIONS PROJECTS – Netia Jones, Claire Booth 9 – 12 DEC I FAGIOLINI 16 – 19 DEC Book online at www.kingsplace.co.uk Telephone 020 7520 1490 or in person at Kings Place

KINGS PLACE MUSIC FOUNDATION Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9AG Joint Editors: Helen Wallace & Duncan Bolt Design: Spring House Design Photography: All music images shot at Kings Place by Tom Bland (many thanks to the multi-talented Kings Place Music Foundation staff who assisted in the photoshoot and Festival production) Atrium (opposite): Morley von Sternberg York Way façade (back cover): Keith Paisley

Kings Place ‘... a place where the curious can drop in at lunchtime, tea time, after work or dinner time, just to see what’s going on. It’s for those who are equally happy with a guitar recital, a contemporary music event, a Beethoven quartet or a platform debate about poetry in the city. That’s very 21st Century.’ Financial Times