Newsletter for Friends of Music in the Round, January 2019

Issue No.77

FRIENDS’ NEWSLETTER

January 2019

CONTENTS

PAGE ONE Bridge Quartet PAGE TWO + THREE Classical Weekend 2019 PAGE FOUR Roderick Williams and Ryan Wigglesworth PAGE FIVE Focus on E360 PAGE SIX Piatti Quartet PAGE SEVEN News and updates PAGE EIGHT Dates for your diary

BRIDGE QUARTET Our new Bridge Quartet is up and running, and 2019 got off to a very good start as Elliot, Jesse, Ken and Raye spent the first few days of the year here in Sheffield. Fears about snow-stricken travel plans proved unfounded, and the residential kicked off on 2 January with a day of rehearsals, mainly focusing on music by Anna Meredith that they’ll be playing in the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival as part of a day at Yellow Arch Studios.

Fraser Wilson tells us more.

Having established that, like many musicians, their working day starts and finishes later than some, on day two a late-morning rehearsal was followed by a bracing afternoon trip to Heeley City Farm. The Bridge scheme aims to support various other aspects of the musicians’ careers as well as their playing, and having returned from the farm, there was a session on PR – how to talk about and promote yourself as a freelance musician and as a quartet member. It’s one of the things that, rightly, is a lower priority than actually making music, but nevertheless an important part of such a career. Have a look on our website now for ‘mini biographies’ of the four players.

On day three we were delighted to welcome Richard Jones, of the Ligeti Quartet, for a day of expert coaching. This was very good timing, because Ligeti has recorded the Anna Meredith piece that the Bridge quartet were just getting to grips with. So there was plenty of advice on how to get to know a contemporary piece like that, for which you have to find some different ways in compared with more traditional repertoire. Speaking your (often pretty complicated) rhythms out loud together was a good one. Anyone who’s read Peter Hill’s article “From score to sound” will know that 90% of practice can be done away from the instrument. Recommended reading for everyone!

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BRIDGE QUARTET CONTINUED...

The residential ended with a nice meal out, an instructive and illuminating lesson for me on how to use Instagram properly, and a look forward to the coming months. The Quartet’s first public appearance will be in March in the Classical Weekend (see Classical Weekend article), and their premiere of Kuljit Bhamra’s new piece will definitely be a highlight of the weekend. Then, in the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, there’s

an open rehearsal exclusively for Friends of MitR (more details to follow). This will be followed by a day at Yellow Arch Studios where the quartet will be mainly focusing on music by Anna Meredith.

By then, plans for the next Bridge Open Course will be well advanced. We plan to run a course for emerging string players over the summer, with expert coaching, lots of playing and socialising.

WHAT’S IN STORE FOR CLASSICAL WEEKEND 2019 Music in the Round is at the heart of the Classical Weekend festival, which has become a fixture in the city’s musical life. You might remember that at the last one, in March 2017, we proudly presented 38 cellists and Oliver Coates at Kelham Island Museum playing John Luther Adams. There was also the Marmen Quartet and Tom McKinney at Yellow Arch Studios and Music Box for Babies with Head Over Reels – a tremendous feast, and that was just Music in the Round’s contribution! There were more than 50 other events over the three days. I’m sure you’ll all remember different things.

The idea of the Classical Weekend is that the city’s music-makers present a varied and compelling programme that attracts both aficionados and newcomers, who can enjoy music in different venues and contexts. Because everything is cheap or even free, it’s easy to take in several events, enjoying both familiar and new music.

This year, for the third Classical Weekend (Friday 8 – Saturday 10 March), there are three themes that reflect the breadth of music on offer: Beyond Borders, Future Makers and Women in Music. A highlight will be the visit of the extraordinary tabla player Kuljit Bhamra MBE, who’ll be a familiar name to many thanks to Mantra and his other previous performances with Music in the Round. His Saturday night programme at Kelham Island Museum is entitled “Fusion Fireworks” and also features Music in the Round’s Bridge Quartet and the Music Hub’s Senior Orchestra playing stirring, colourful classical Indian music in the museum’s atmospheric surroundings. A newly commissioned piece by Kuljit for tabla and string quartet will be premiered as part of the programme. One not to miss! Plus, on the Sunday morning, everyone is welcome to come and try the tabla in a free workshop with Kuljit that’s open to all.

Richard Jones (Ligeti Quartet) coaching the Bridge Quartet

Ensemble 360 also make two major contributions at this year’s festival. Claudia Ajmone-Marsan and Ruth Gibson will perform all 44 Duos by Bartók in the course of an afternoon at the Winter Garden. These miniatures are fantastically inventive and it’ll be great to hear

them in that lovely space as people gather to listen. Before March, you can watch Ruth and Claudia playing a couple of them on our website.

Ensemble 360 will explore the festival theme of Women in Music through works by three female composers working in three different centuries. In a review of the first performance, Helen Grime’s String Quartet was described by The Scotsman as “a triumph of concision” with a “seamless unwinding of the music.” Helen’s work has been featured by The Hallé and the London Symphony Orchestra, and she is a former Composer-inResidence at Wigmore Hall. There are parallels between the lives of Amy Beach and Clara Schumann; both were highly successful concert pianists, but in the societies in which they lived their composing abilities and skills were often overlooked or discouraged. Born Amy Cheney in 1867, Amy was forced to agree to being billed as ‘Mrs H. H. A. Beach’ on all future concert programmes on the occasion of her marriage to prominent Boston surgeon Dr Henry Beach, who was 24 years her senior, in 1885. Such lack of appreciation and support of talent would certainly not have been unfamiliar to Fanny Mendelssohn.

At the age of 15 she was told by her father, Abraham, “Music will perhaps become [your brother’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament”, giving rise to one of the biggest ‘what if…?’ questions in music history.

Book at classicalsheffield.org.uk or call 0114 2233 777

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A COLLABORATION WITH RYAN WIGGLESWORTH AND RODERICK WILLIAMS

Ryan’s new work will be performed on Thursday 28 February (7.15pm) at the Upper Chapel

Happy new year to you all from Shenzhen!

I’m currently on a 9-day tour of China with my orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Like many orchestral tours it has been quite an exhausting itinerary! We are here with Nicola Benedetti (CBE as of 1st January) playing various Scottish-inspired works that the audience love.

Discussions with artists about concert programmes often begin a long time in advance of the performance, and the sequence of songs that Roddy Williams has crafted for his recital on 28 February is the result of an idea that has been fermenting in his mind for some considerable time.

It started in quite a nebulous fashion: “I’m thinking of a programme that makes a nod towards today’s fascination with gender fluidity”, he wrote to me – yet there was one element about which Roddy was already determined. Spurred on by the offer from the Barbican Centre to commission a new piece, which will be premiered just two days before the Sheffield recital, Roddy had decided that he wished to invite the young composer (and conductor) Ryan Wigglesworth to write the new work.

Certainly, Ryan’s musical credentials are impeccable.

He is currently Composer-in-Residence at English National Opera, having previously completed a composing fellowship with the Cleveland Orchestra, and has recently written for Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Ryan was Principal Guest Conductor of The Hallé from 2015-18 and, having worked with pretty well every major British orchestra, he is expanding his international horizons in 2019 with debuts in Vienna, Tokyo and Melbourne. But I still asked Roddy the obvious question, “why Ryan?”

“Ryan’s music that I’ve heard has been totally beguiling”, Roddy responded. “The first piece was his Echo and Narcissus, which I heard Mark Padmore and Pamela Helen Stephen perform at the Endellion Festival with Ryan at the piano. I thought the idea itself, the harmonies and the textures were beautiful and thrilling. And then I went to Ryan’s opera, The

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FOCUS ON E360: ADRIAN WILSON

I’m really looking forward to getting back to Sheffield to give a lunchtime recital with Tim on 25th January before revisiting the children’s concert Giddy Goat. In the recital Tim and I are playing three of the most popular works in the oboe repertoire (Poulenc and Saint-Säens sonatas and the Britten Temporal Variations) plus a short and relatively recent discovery - the Soliloquy by Elgar, which was originally intended as the slow movement of a concerto written for Leon Goosens.

Winter’s Tale, at English National Opera; I was particularly impressed by how well he wrote for the voices at his disposal. He stretched and challenged his singers, but also wrote lyrically for them. He left them room to express the words and express themselves. I knew right then that I wanted to commission something from him.”

What Roddy didn’t know about until I told him was Ryan’s connection with Sheffield. The son of a butcher from Wincobank, Ryan was ‘talentspotted’ singing lustily at school assemblies and he was taken on as a boy chorister at Sheffield Cathedral. As he said recently in an interview with the Sheffield Star, “I was this strange little creature, who was obsessed with the music we were doing. I started writing my own pieces based on composers like Mendelssohn.” Subsequent schooling at King Edward VII School in the city preceded further studies at Oxford University; thereafter the international music circuit beckoned. But it was undoubtedly in those early Sheffield years that the foundation was laid: “My dad had an artistic bent, painting and carving in his spare time, and there were LPs lying around of Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, which I became obsessed by.”

The rest of the year has many highlights for me, including a tour of California (some visits to the wineries of Napa Valley as a welcome addition), more concerts in February and March with Ensemble 360 and then, of course, the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival in May. At this year’s festival I’m particularly excited to revisit Britten’s highly evocative Six Metamorphoses after Ovid Op.49 with the equally atmospheric Niobe by Thea Musgrave, a work that I played in the final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year contest back in 1996 and then to the composer on her 70th birthday! Other highlights would be Schumann’s beautiful romances and an informal concert including the Berio Opus Number Zoo for narrating wind quintet.

BBC RADIO 3 AND A WORLD PREMIERE IN BARNSLEY On 30 November Laurence Osborn’s new work, Me and 4 Ponys, received its world premiere as part of our concert series in Barnsley. The atmosphere of the performance was incredible, helped by having a packed audience made up of both regular concertgoers and new faces.

Ensemble 360 did what Ensemble 360 always does and blew the audience away whilst BBC Radio 3 listened on in their broadcast van outside.

Before the concert Laurence visited local GCSE music students from Holy Trinity Secondary School.

“I was thrilled to see some of them at the Barnsley gig, as well as younger members of Barnsley’s String Orchestras. The sight of them engrossed by Ensemble 360’s performance of Brahms’s C Minor String Quartet reminded me why organisations like Barnsley Music Hub are so important for the cultural landscape of this country.”

If you missed this performance, or the one the subsequent day in Sheffield, the BBC Radio 3 programme will be broadcast early in the summer – we’ll let you know when. This is one of three concerts from our national programme that BBC Radio 3 is recording for later broadcast. The other two concerts are from Portsmouth Guildhall on 25 March (Trio Isimsiz) and The Stables, Milton Keynes, on 5 May (Marmen Quartet).

Hope to see you all very soon.

Adrian x

Composer Laurence Osborn with students from Holy Trinity School in Barnsley

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NEWS AND LOOKING AHEAD In ancient Roman myth, Janus was the god of beginnings, archways and endings, and he is usually depicted with two faces: one looking to the past and one to the future. The month named after him, January, is often a time for reflection as well as anticipation for the year to come - as well as making (and breaking!) New Year resolutions.

MEET THE PIATTI QUARTET Your last visit to us was in 2013, shortly after you’d graduated from music college, and today you’re well established as one of the UK’s leading quartets. Has there been a particular highlight during that time?

If we were to compare our progress to something akin to scaling a mountain, it feels like we are quite a lot higher than we were six years ago!

We have certainly matured in style and found an internal rhythm in regards to the way we rehearse, think and philosophise about the music.

Winning multiple prizes at the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition was a big moment for us: we had strived so hard to achieve recognition in the competition arena and it allowed us to breathe and then move on from that scene.

Many quartets struggle to make the leap from students to professionals. What’s the key to keeping a quartet going?

For us, we enjoy each other’s company and we find that we have a special and deep musical connection. It’s important to recognise and remind ourselves of that from time to time, especially when quartet life gets hectic and stressful. We also enjoy the study and performance of the magnificent quartet repertoire and we feel we still have a lot to discover and share with ourselves and audiences alike.

You’ve programmed Frank Bridge, Mendelssohn and Beethoven for us in March. The latter two will be familiar to our regular audience members, but what can we expect from the Three Idylls by Bridge?

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Frank Bridge was a wonderful composer and teacher - he taught Benjamin Britten at the Royal College of Music. The aspects that might surprise you about the work are the jazzy harmonies that dazzle throughout and the range of sounds that Bridge uncovers in the string instruments. The Idylls swing in mood and nature, so you have a full kaleidoscope of emotions from dark melancholy to frivolous joy.

We’re led to believe that string quartets share a unique bond with each other, one that’s more intense and unlike that of other chamber groups.

Do you think that’s true?

It’s certainly true up to a point. We know each other so well that it feels we are married to one another - in fact, there is a married couple in the group!

There are legendary stories of quartets falling out spectacularly with one another and we try to keep level-headed. The fact that four members must somehow come to a consensus can lead to very intense rehearsals and relationships.

You’re involved in many fascinating projects. What can we expect from you in the future?

When we perform for you in Sheffield we will have just premiered a new commission from MarkAnthony Turnage in Brussels, and this will be a major addition to the quartet repertoire. The UK premiere will be at Wigmore Hall in May. Contemporary music is something we are very passionate about and believe that it lies at the heart of keeping the genre alive and interesting.

Piatti Quartet will be performing at the Crucible Studio Theatre on Thursday 21 March, 7.15pm

Looking back at 2018, we launched the newAngela and Ed, held a moving ceremony in the Peaks look Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, featuring in early December, and there will be opportunity many more events and guests over the nine to remember James during the Sheffield Chamber days. Highlights included ‘Man with a Movie Music Festival at a concert dedicated to him on Camera’, Marcus du Sautoy and our ‘Meet the 11 May. Musicians’ sessions and we hope to repeat its success in 2019. We also relaunched our Bridge There were hellos in 2018 as well as farewells, as not scheme to focus on emerging string players of only did Ensemble 360 bassoonist Amy Harman give minority ethnic backgrounds, and performed birth to a daughter in the summer, but so did flautist to thousands of young people at schools’ and Juliette Bausor in December, and we give both of family concerts. The latter part of the year saw them (and dads!) all our best wishes for the future.

2017 was a bumper year in Music in the Round’s festival calendar with more in one us taking music ‘on tour’ around Sheffield, year than ever before.

Marvellous Mozart was the festivals inthe Milton from St Andrew’s Church and Firth Hall to the Lookingfocus aheadof toinaugural 2019, we have just put finishing Leadmill. All these venues proved to be aand greatScarborough touches whilst to the Festival programme and brochure Keynes, Bowness-on-Windermere Sensational Schubert graced setting for ain variety of music, popular with both Ensemble in advance launching at the lunchtime going!) concert the stage Doncaster.

The effervescent 360of(let’s keep itthe alliteration regular and new audiences, so we are planning on 25 January. It’s a busy start to the year as the were reliably at the helm, steering audiences through the music of these much-loved to visit some of them again in the future, even Spring Season gets underway, our Schubert in composers their usualvery passion and flair. Schools Julian Horton, Paul to Allen and John though Upperwith Chapel is looking spick and project comes a conclusion andSuchet the four span following its refurbishment. musicians of ourcreative Bridge scheme come together also made appearances for concerts and talks.

There were art sessions and in forworkshops rehearsals and coaching in advance concerts for children and their families, BringSheffield and Sing and the chance for of Late in the year we were hugely saddened to their performances in the Classical Weekend. These anyone to try an instrument for the first time. hear that a long-time generous supporter of activities are supported by you, our Friends, and we Music in the Round, James Kellie, passed away appreciate all you do to help us take chamber music suddenly while holidaying with his family in out of the concert hall and into communities. We Australia during the autumn. His wife and son, rely on your donations and bequests to keep music alive for all generations - thank you!

Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2018

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ENSEMBLE 360 ON TOUR Portsmouth, Portsmouth Guildhall 28 January 2019. 7.30pm DOHNÁNYI Sextet COPLAND Sextet BRAHMS Clarinet Quintet 20 May, 7.30pm MAHLER Piano Quartet STRAUSS Piano Quartet BRAHMS Piano Quartet in A Op.26 023 9387 0200 www.portsmouthguildhall.org.uk Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire Music Centre 2 February, 7.30pm SCHUMANN Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano Op.70 MENDELSSOHN Piano Trio No.2 in C minor Op.66 BRAHMS Horn Trio in E flat Op.40 01225 860100 www.wiltshiremusic.org.uk Leamington, Royal Spa Centre 10 February, 3pm MOZART Oboe Quartet BEETHOVEN La ci Darem variations MOZART Adagio Rondo SCHUBERT Impromptu D.899 No.3 in G flat SCHUBERT Octet 5 May, 7.30pm Ensemble 360 and Roderick Williams SKEMPTON The Rime of the Ancient Mariner SKEMPTON Man and Bat 01926 334418 www.royalspacentreandtownhall.co.uk Carlisle, Old FIre Station 15 February, 7.30pm SCHUMANN Three Romances for oboe and piano Op.94 REINECKE Trio in A minor Op.188 for oboe, horn and piano SCHUMANN Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano Op.70 BRAHMS Piano Trio in B Op.8 01228 598596 www.oldfirestation.carlisle.city

4th Floor, Sheffield Central Library, Surrey Street Sheffield S1 1XZ Registered Charity number: 326811 Company number 1880734 VAT number 391 1875 33

Keswick, Theatre by the Lake 17 February, 7.30pm, SCHUMANN Three Romances for oboe and piano Op.94 REINECKE Trio in A minor Op.188 for oboe, horn and piano SCHUMANN Adagio and Allegro for piano and horn BRAHMS Piano Trio in B Op.8 017687 74411 www.theatrebythelake.com Doncaster, Cast 9 March, 7pm SCHUMANN Three Romances for oboe and piano Op.94 REINECKE Trio in A minor Op.188 for oboe, horn and piano FRANZ STRAUSS Nocturno for Horn Op.7 BRAHMS Piano Trio in B Op.8 22 June, 7pm MOZART Divertimento in E flat K.563 BEETHOVEN String Trio in E flat Op.3 01302 303959 www.castindoncaster.com Barnsley, Emmanuel Methodist Church 22 March, 7.30pm MOZART Piano Trio in G K496 SUK Piano Quintet in G Minor Op.8 DVOŘÁK Piano Quintet No.2 in A Op.81 01226 327000 www.barnsleycivic.co.uk Newcastle-under-Lyme, New Vic Theatre 15 April, 7.30pm MAHLER Piano Quartet STRAUSS Piano Quartet BRAHMS Piano Quartet in A Op.26 01782 717962 www.newvictheatre.org.uk Jordans, Seer Green Jubilee Hall 14 July, 7.30pm STRAUSS Till Eulenspeigel einmal anders!

BEETHOVEN String Trio Op.3 in E flat BEETHOVEN Septet 01923 282943 www.jordansmusicclub.org.uk