Just a Note…The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers... Ensemble 360 double bassist Laurène Durantel tells us about her favourite music, places and hobbies… Favourite piece of music? Hard to answer... Two of them, Mozart String Quintet in C and Schumann Piano Trio No.3.
Who or what is your biggest influence? Glenn Gould, the first own record I ever owned - I still listen to him nearly every day.
What do you like to do in your spare time? Read, read and read, getting lost in Paris and making my cat mad. What book are you reading? Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov - an hommage to laziness. Favourite place in the world? Praha! If you hadn’t become a bassist, what instrument would you have chosen? I started on the piano, and I would have loved to have been a pianist in an opera house. In one sentence sum up your average working day. Carpe diem. If you hadn’t become a musician, what do you think you would have chosen as a career? A little stylist in Coco Chanel’s boutique in 1920s Paris. You can hear Laurène’s Desert Island Concert on Friday 11 March.
, Friends Choice
She whips a pistol from her knickers! Ensemble 360 is touring Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood in 2010/11 to venues around England. This adaptation by Paul Patterson is a real treat for listeners of all ages; the little bursts of avant-garde for the thunderstorm near the beginning, the musical menu of possibilities for the wolf’s lunch in which Wagner’s Isolde is scandalously identified as a “juicy cow”, Grandmama’s Beethoven-inspired doorbell and what Patterson calls the “cat-walk” music for Little Red Riding Hood’s final appearance. In this story, which
hinges on characters pretending to be other characters, there is a great deal of ingenuity in the way that the themes associated with one character similarly impersonate those of another. But then, as the narrator says near the beginning in the forest, “appearances can be very, very deceptive. Nothing is ever quite what it seems...” Ensemble 360 and Polly Ives are performing Little Red Riding Hood as children’s concerts as well as in evening concerts in Barnsley on Friday 18 March and in Doncaster on Saturday 19 March.
The Making of MitR When I was sitting in the doctor’s surgery a few years ago, a familiar figure walked in. The somewhat officious receptionist asked who he was, to which the reply was “Peter Cropper, DOB 19.11.45”. It seemed strange and sad to me that someone who has done so much for Sheffield should be unrecognised by a mature woman who had probably lived in the city all her life. I came to Sheffield in 1972, the same year as The Lindsays, and have followed the story of the development of Music in the Round enthusiastically, to the extent that I
am attempting to write a book about it, with the support of the Board of MitR. However, other Friends will have different experiences from mine, and I would like to hear of these. A favourite anecdote of mine is about the impromptu speech by Radoslav Kvapil when a string broke during the Smetana Piano Trio at the 1990 Czech Festival. I expect to talk to a lot of people over the coming months, but if you have memories or documentary information which you think would enliven the story, please email me at david.grey@btinternet.com or telephone me on 0114 266 3820. David Grey, Friend of MitR
Vote for the piece of your choice and help sponsor a concert! We know that not everyone is able to sponsor a whole concert but that our Friends like to be supportive, so, we hope you might like to get involved in a scheme to help support one of the concerts in the May Festival. The Ensemble has put together a menu of short pieces and we’re inviting Friends to vote for a piece to be included in the concert. The list of pieces, plus details of how to vote and make a donation to the cost of the concert, are available on request from the office. To add an element of surprise, we’ll announce the winning piece at the start of the concert. We’ll also put the names of all the voters into a hat to win two tickets for a concert of your choice at any of our venues.
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Issue No.54
Forthcoming Highlight
This month Ensemble 360 invites old friends the Elias String Quar tet back to the Studio for a weekend of concerts , featuring music by Beethoven and from Russi a. The weekend takes place on Friday 21 January and Saturday 22 January and weekend ticket s are available.
Friends Newsletter ’
January 2011
Contents...
page one Don ald Grant page two En semble 360 is Complete! | M oving Forwar d page three The Danish Q u ar tet page four Just a Note | Little Red R iding Hood | The M aking of Mit R
We chatted to Donald Grant about life after Sheffield, forthcoming Elias concerts, and the crossover between being a classical and folk musician. What have you been up to since leaving MitR? We have had a crazy time since leaving Sheffield. We have all moved to London but have been travelling a lot, which has been fun, including a tour of Australia, touring with pianist Jonathan Biss and with cellist Alice Neary, the Kungsbacka Trio’s festival in Sweden, a Mendelssohn cycle at King’s Place, a residency at the Wigmore Hall, our debut at the Concertgebouw... Lots of nice things. We’ve been on BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Scheme, which has been fairly intense. Lots of recording, both live and in the studio. We have also recorded a live performance from the Wigmore Hall of Haydn and Schumann and a disc of Mendelssohn. Are you looking forward to coming back to the Studio? Can’t wait! It was our first home back in... when was it? 2005? Wow, we’re getting on aren’t we?! The Studio has special memories for us and it has that unique atmosphere. We’re really looking forward to seeing the audience again. I hope there will be a chance to have a wee drink with everyone at some point. Tell us a bit about the weekend you’re performing in with E360 We’ll be playing two Beethoven quartets and Bartok 3. We’ll also be doing a schools’ concert and a post-concert chat. It’ll be great to spend some time with the Ensemble again. And ESQ’s on tour with MitR – what’s the programme? We’ll be playing Beethoven Op.18 No.1, Bartok 3 and Smetana 1 From my Life. The Smetana was one of the first pieces we played a lot when we began life at the RNCM in 1998, so it’s been fascinating to come back to it after all these years. What else is coming up for the Elias? Lots of recording for Radio 3, which includes concerts at the Proms, City of London Festival and Cheltenham
Festival. We’re off to China and our first tour of the States including our Carnegie Hall debut. We’ll be recording with tenor Mark Padmore and working with clarinetist Michael Collins. We’re also having a couple of new pieces written for us, which is very exciting. You received an award from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. What are you planning with their funding? We’re working towards a Beethoven cycle. We’ll be playing the quartets extensively over the next three years and performing the complete cycle in various venues the year after. We are building a new website that will allow you to exclusively follow our journey, which will include textual, audio and video elements. We hope to interview experts and quartet players and ask them to contribute to the site. Our first call was to Peter Cropper who will be contributing and we’d love to come back and share our findings with the MitR audience. The site will be up and running in March. How have things been going with your folk music? All going well and I love the variety of switching between it and quartet. Since Festive Folk at the Crucible last year I have worked with lots of different musicians and played at the Blas Festival and Celtic Connections. I also recorded on Kate Rusby’s new album and have been writing some new music of my own. I was delighted with reviews and sales of my last album and hope to record again in the not too distant future. You’re doing a folk concert with us in March - what will that involve? Yeah! Can’t wait. I’ll be bringing my new trio with Eilidh Martin on cello and Phil Alexander on piano. I’ve known Eilidh for many years and we’ve played together on lots of different projects. I met Phil doing some gigs with him and Catriona McKay a few years ago.
You may know him from his band Moishe’s Bagel which I am a massive fan of. I always love to include the music I was immersed in when I was a kid and we’ll also be writing new material with strong elements of improvisation. We’re going play some classical music, including some of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, stripping them down to their folk roots, something I’ve wanted to do for years. Tell us about your involvement with programming folk for Music in the Round I’ve been programming the folk/world concerts at MitR for quite a few years now and have loved sharing music I love with an audience I got to know. It’s a bit like swapping CDs with friends... but better! We’ve had lots of great artists over the years and hope to have some interesting collaborations in the years to come. I’ve always believed that there shouldn’t be a divide in genres of music... when it’s great it’s great and worth hearing. Some of my most memorable concert experiences have been when I didn’t really know what I was going to. What other folk concerts are coming up this Spring? The Urban Folk Quartet on the Saturday 19 March - They’re brilliant, check them out on their website: www.theurbanfolkquartet.com. You can hear the Elias String Quartet in Sheffield on Friday 21 January (including a post-concert chat), in Doncaster on Thursday 19 May (as part of Doncaster HotHouse Festival), in Barnsley on Friday 27 May and on our national tour between January and June. You can hear Donald’s folk trio in Sheffield on Saturday 5 March and in Wiltshire on Sunday 6 March.
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Moving Forward
Over the summer a great deal was going on behind the scenes in the Music in the Round office, and we thought you might like to hear about some of our plans. We’re bringing different strands of activity across South Yorkshire, on tour and in the community closer together through the way they are programmed and marketed, to make the most of our work with Ensemble 360 and visiting musicians, and make our background operations more efficient. Music in the Round has always valued and enjoyed working in partnership with other organisations. We aim to do this more in the future through co-promotion and the development of new and intriguing creative projects. There are hints of this in Angus and the Ensemble’s first May Festival programme together next year, which we’re all very excited about. It has been a real pleasure for us in the office to get to know Angus as he’s worked on the May Festival, and as he plans the programmes and artists for 2011/12; his openness and strong artistic ambition matched with artistic integrity and keen interest in wine (!) have made for a smooth but interesting transition. The outline of our concert series on tour and in South Yorkshire will remain unchanged, but there are plans afoot for some rather special additional projects. We are revamping our touring programme, working ever more closely with our current partners to support audience development and building on our relationships with artists to strengthen the delivery and understanding of Music in the Round’s name and
ethos across the country. Our touring partners joined us in Sheffield for a stimulating and invigorating conference in October to discuss these plans. One feature for the future is the establishment of an Associate Artists scheme which will allow us to work in greater depth and detail with selected groups of musicians over a three-year period. We are also seeking funding to appoint a Children’s Composer in Residence for three years starting with a new commission of The Chimpanzees of Happytown in 2011/12, and to develop an Associate Composer scheme in collaboration with the University of Huddersfield. This project will create a wonderful opportunity for a young composer to work with Ensemble 360 across all our concert programmes. You will all no doubt have noticed the new-look concert programmes that now include specially commissioned programme notes, which are also available on our website. New podcasts and videos will be available throughout the year and you can now listen to the music in the programmes via Spotify to help you familiarise yourself with any music that may be new to you. Add to all of this the exciting news that we now have a complete Ensemble 360 and the future looks very bright indeed!
www.musicintheround.co.uk | 0114 281 4660
The Danish Quartet
We spoke to the Danish Quartet about life as a string quartet, winning the London International String Quartet Competition and their forthcoming concerts with MitR… How and when did you become a quartet? We met at a summer music camp in the Danish countryside. We immediately established a close friendship based on music, soccer and everything else that is a part of the life of young boys. We started playing music together, just for the fun of it. Sight reading all the masterpieces. We grew up together in this sense, enjoying our friendship and the music. Tell us about your success at the London International String Quartet Competition in 2009 When we first applied for the London competition, we first of all looked at it as a great chance to learn some new repertoire, and to work hard and focus as a group, without having anywhere to perform the results in the end. As we were selected in the first round, the motivation for working grew bigger, even though our main focus was somehow never competing. When we finally arrived in London we just decided to relax, play and have fun as usual, and not to be stressed by the situation. It seemed to work for us, and for every stage that we advanced, we just gained a good energy boost, since we had so little expectations. The evening of the final results felt like a crazy version of Christmas Eve, and even though it was a glorious moment, it will always feel a bit unreal. The feeling of doing well at a competition like that is quite overwhelming, but when you find yourself back in your old apartment and your everyday life, the main goal of good work together still feels like the most important thing. Have you played in the UK much before? We have played in the UK before, but never on a tour like this one. The last time was the competition. We have only good memories from our stays
we recorded it, and partly because we feel that this is where What makes your perfect concert? a young composer If there is such a thing as a meets a young quartet. perfect concert, certainly contains Nielsen is in the very communication. If the listener is beginning of his career, open and follows your intentions, and while he still is very the music-making will happen by inexperienced, his braveness and itself, without having to force it willpower covers for his lack of technical in any direction. Pretty much like finesse. The energy and youthfulness having a smooth conversation with of the piece strikes the listener from the no misunderstanding. The listener beginning until the end. The Beethoven could of course be a member of the Op.127 is one of the pieces that we did quartet, so the communication goes at the London competition, and so it has on in many different directions. We become one of our favourites as well. It’s probably haven’t experienced the the first piece of what people refer to as perfect concert yet, but are pretty sure “the late quartets”, in which Beethoven that it includes a good meal and a clearly challenges and even evolves drink afterwards. the traditional string quartet form. In ` comparison to the Mozart for instance, What are your highlights as a each individual voice in the group is quartet so far? of a more equal importance, and the The most obvious highlights are the technical level required to play the parts competitions that we did. They have is maybe higher, or at least different really been great door openers, and than the earlier classical repertoire. meant a lot in terms of the career It has a rich variety of emotions and of the quartet. But many of the atmospheres. highlights happen offstage as well. Luckily we enjoy travelling together, Is there one composer’s work you and it’s especially rewarding if we particularly enjoy playing? have the time to hang around a little It’s always hard to choose only one bit while we’re away from home. Some composer from the four hundred year of the highlights occur around dinner old history of composers and pieces that tables or just by walking around in classical music has to offer. However, unknown places. For instance, we had being the Danish String Quartet, we a great time in the West Cork Chamber are very fortunate that our national Music Festival this summer. composer Nielsen wrote string quartets Tell us about the programme you are of a high standard. We find that people playing with MitR across the country rarely have heard his music abroad, Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet is really so it’s always a real pleasure to give a new couple of ears the opportunity to one of the big hits from the classical experience his music. repertoire. It was considered very modern at the time, mostly because of You can hear the Danish String Quartet the slow and mysterious opening in on tour in February and March, which Mozart uses some unusual and including at the Sheffield Theatres unexpected chords. Nielsen’s Quartet Studio on Wednesday 2 March. in G minor is a piece that we have a close relationship with. Partly because
in the UK, and we are really looking forward to creating some new ones.
We are delighted to announce this year’s May Festival theme…
Friday 6 - Saturday 14 May 2011 Intimate Letters - Passion, obsession and desire Austrian, Hungarian and Bohemian music, 1804-1945. “You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. Those notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately...” Leo Janáček This will be the first event to be programmed by our new Artistic Director Angus Smith, in collaboration with Ensemble 360, so it’s not to be missed!