Issue No.73
FRIENDS’ NEWSLETTER
September 2017
PAUL ALLEN INTERVIEWS ANGUS SMITH
CONTENTS PAGE ONE World of Strings
PAGE TWO Patrick Brennan PAGE THREE Children’s Commission PAGE FOUR Schubert Cycle PAGE FIVE Marmen Quartet PAGE SIX New Bridge Scheme PAGE SEVEN News from MitR PAGE EIGHT Dates for your diary
ABOUT OUR NEW PROGRAMMING STRAND ‘WORLD OF STRINGS’ Music “guaranteed to bring a smile to the face” is how Angus Smith describes Strad in Rio, the concert in November that begins Music in the Round’s three-year musical adventure, the World of Strings project. The Strad belongs to Viktoria Mullova, the Russian violinist best known for playing the great classical sonatas and concertos from Bach to Bartôk. Wanting to explore beyond perceived boundaries of the classical tradition led her to devise this programme. Hence the Rio part of the title. Composers featured will include Antonio Carlos Jobim whose most popular piece must be The Girl from Ipanema. Guitarist João Luis Nogueiro Pinto joins Mullova, her cellist husband Matthew Barley and percussionist Paul Clarvis for the concert. The music will dance. Angus’ intention is that World of Strings will have the western classical tradition at its core. The great sonatas, trios and quartets will be heard in this highly ambitious cycle. But it is also about connections. He says: “I was working with an Indian sitar player who pointed out to me that an instrument invented in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago was called the sitar when it went east and the guitar when it went west. It seems to me that each country or culture developed its own instruments, the tools of the trade, and then the ways of using them.
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“We’ll explore the wealth of the classics, but the project is also a melting pot of different instruments, practices, styles and ideas.” So, the day after Strad in Rio, a kora and an oud feature in the Rafiki Jazz concert. In May 2018 Welsh harpist Catrin Finch joins Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita who has been profoundly influenced by hearing Bach and will play some. Catrin will also be playing Ravel and Debussy in February with our marvellous resident musicians, Ensemble 360. And folk fiddler Sam Sweeney will express his interest in Purcell and a time when “folk” and “classical” were often interchangeable.
Greek myth says that the god Hermes invented the lyre by taking the shell of a tortoise and stretching cow’s intestines across it. Leaving aside the question of what would have happened to music generally if animal rights had been higher on the agenda, this seems a useful metaphor for the way most cultures developed instruments, trying out materials to hand, seeing what sounded good. Strings are near-universal (indigenous Australians are an exception) and some years ago David Blunkett while still an MP asked if Music in the Round had any spare violins we could let the Roma people in his constituency borrow. We didn’t, to my regret, but I understood why they wanted them: their strings expressed their lives.
Viktoria Mullova brings Strad in Rio to the Crucible Studio on Friday 17 November while Rafiki Jazz perform on Saturday 18 November. Tickets are still available. In spring 2018, we’ll be hosting concerts with Sam Sweeney and the Chiaroscuro Quartet as part of the programme too.
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MEET PATRICK BRENNAN, RPS COMPOSER
PATRICK BRENNAN’s new commission ‘Ember’ will have its world premiere performed by Ensemble 360 in Sheffield on Wednesday 8 November 2017. Tickets can be booked at Sheffield Theatres box office, 0114 249 6000 or musicintheround.co.uk
Patrick Brennan earned his Bachelor’s degree in piano at the Royal College of Music and completed his Master’s in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he was awarded a Guildhall Artist fellowship. In 2013/14 he studied on the Soloist class of the Royal Danish Academy of music under Hans Abrahamsen and Bent Sørensen. His music has won several awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society’s “Inspired by the Stars” competition and the Guildhall School’s RPO composition award. He was selected for participation in the LSO’s Panufnik Scheme, and was subsequently commissioned by the orchestra to write a new piece, that premiered at the Barbican in February 2015 under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. Other upcoming commissions include works for Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Benyounes Quartet and Piano Circus. Brennan is the recent recipient of a full AHRC scholarship for doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Richard Causton. He has been a designated RPS “Young Artist” and is a member of the Association of Irish Composers. Angus Smith asks Patrick a few questions… What is your earliest musical memory? I started playing piano at the age of 4. I don’t remember much of anything before that, but my parents have mentioned something about a small toy drum I used to like. Did you always want to compose? If not, when did that ambition take hold? I didn’t really know anything about new music until I moved to London at 18. As far as I knew at that time, Bartók was the last proper composer and all the living composers were just working in Hollywood. And I only knew about Bartók because he was on my A-level syllabus. As soon as I heard
what other people were doing I wanted to have a go at it myself. Are there particular composers from the past or the present who inspire you? My favourite living composer is Kurtág. Other big inspirations are Ligeti, Grisey, Dutilleux, Stravinsky and Feldman. My favourite older composers are (currently) Beethoven, Machaut and Purcell. What do you feel like when you hear one of your works performed for the first time? I’m always nervous. Sometimes, if it’s been sounding good in rehearsal, I’ll be nervous and happy at the same time. And can you say just a few words about the new piece that Ensemble 360 will be presenting on 8th November? This piece is for clarinet, piano and string quartet and is in three movements. It’s got stuff in it from all sorts of places, so coming up with a title was pretty difficult. I’ve decided to call it ‘Ember’, which isn’t a poetic title at all; it just refers to the pub near my flat where I wrote most of it. It’s got bits of “spectral” music, some twelve-tone rows, an awful lot of mashed up tonal chord progressions and two Irish folk tunes which I took apart and reassembled.
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STAN AND MABEL AND THE RACE FOR SPACE The 18-month process of commissioning our new story-based project for young children is drawing to a close! As you know, this time we’ve commissioned authorillustrator Jason Chapman to devise a sequel to the brilliant Stan & Mabel, and he’s been working with Paul Rissmann to bring it all to reality. Over the past few weeks Polly, Fraser, and Kate have been finalising the resources that form such a central part of the experience. Children and their families and schools can watch Polly teaching the songs on YouTube, download the songs to sing along to, and get creative before and after the concerts. This year we’ve made the resources even more interesting by filming Polly on a green screen so that she can be immersed into the story’s environments, and by working with children from Beck and Greystones schools.
Their imaginative ideas in response to images and tunes from Paul and Jason have fed directly into the story and music! The project begins this autumn with sold-out performances – more than ever before – with children aged 3-8 from all over the city in the Crucible Main House. This will be followed by touring and family concerts around the country in 2018. So get ready for a new round of super-addictive songs and brilliant musical fun for the whole family…
COMPOSITION AND CREATIVITY Central to Music in the Round is the idea of people ‘making music’ in all the senses of the word, and enabling everyone to find the place that music can take in their lives. This is the focus of our ‘Composition and Creativity’ work. It embraces everything from the first musical steps of babies and families to Powerplus, school composing projects, and chances for adults to take part in all kinds of music-making and other art forms. So whether it’s composing for the first time in the company of Sheffield creators Platform 4, creating art or sculpture to the accompaniment of live music, or enabling young children to begin to use their imagination and discover their creativity, Music in the Round aims to provide opportunities to engage with music in creative and inspiring ways.
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TIM HORTON SHEDS A LITTLE LIGHT ON HIS FORTHCOMING CYCLE OF SCHUBERT’S GREATEST SONATAS
Having completed a cycle of the Beethoven Sonatas in 2015 I felt somewhat bereft. To immerse oneself in these pieces for four years inevitably leads to some withdrawal when the experience is over, and I was keen to move onto something else as soon as possible. Schubert was one of the more obvious composers to explore next but to me, at least, a cycle of Schubert Sonatas is a very different undertaking to that of Beethoven. A series of Schubert Sonatas does not contain the same sense of completeness, a feeling of traversing an entire career or the stages of a composer’s development as it does with Beethoven. Many of Schubert’s Sonatas are incomplete or tantalising fragments, and, with some notable exceptions, Schubert did not use the piano as a means of experimentation, compositionally or instrumentally. A more interesting approach presented itself. I am fascinated by the legacy of composers. I am convinced that most people’s hesitancy over contemporary music, for example, would be alleviated, to some extent, if they knew where the music came from - what are the connections from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner to Schoenberg to Boulez to Birtwistle, to take just one thread? One could divert that thread from Beethoven to Schubert forwards and present a different perspective. Schubert’s influence on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century music has been every bit as profound as Beethoven’s if less well-known. The cycle I have put together, while by no means exhaustive, shows some of those influences. Schumann is credited with ‘discovering’ or promoting a lot of Schubert’s music after his death, the great C major Symphony being the
most famous example. I was very keen to include Schumann in the cycle. While his Humoreske Op. 20 has no direct link to Schubert’s Sonata D.845, the mixture of dramatic and lyric styles is clearly indebted to him. Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy had a profound effect on Liszt, who made a version for piano and orchestra. The form of that piece is the direct model for Liszt’s B minor Sonata, which, in turn, was the model for Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. Both of these composers will feature in the second programme alongside the G major Sonata D.894. The penultimate programme includes Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, the title of which amalgamates two sets of miniatures by Schubert. To me this is one the most touching homages to Schubert ever written. The last three Schubert Sonatas present a canon that is unsurpassed in music. While they were not, as romantically asserted, the last outburst of his life (in fact he sketched them from the beginning of 1828) he did complete them in September of that year. They are as profound a final utterance as humanity will ever produce.
Tim’s first two Schubert concerts are on Saturday 2 December 2017 and Wednesday 28 March 2018. Find out more and book tickets at www.musicintheround.co.uk or via Sheffield Theatres box office 0114 249 6000.
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WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE MARMEN QUARTET? As the Marmen Quartet’s three year programme with Music in the Round as our ‘Bridge’ quartet comes to an end, we spoke to Johannes Marmen (violin) about their plans for 2018 and beyond. “As we come to a close of the three-year ‘Bridge’ scheme, we have more and better contacts and relationships with promoters and music organisers everywhere across England, and especially around Sheffield. In 2018 we will of course continue to play concerts around the UK. We’ve been included as a “selected artist” in Making Music’s annual brochure, which should help further in reaching out to more and more audiences around the country. We will also continue our work with Simon Rowland-Jones, who’s been our mentor on the ‘Bridge Scheme’, but this time at the Royal College of Music in London, where we will be studying towards an Artist Diploma. On top of that we will enroll for a Master of Chamber Music degree at the Hannover School of Music, Theatre and Media, where we will study with Oliver Wille, an amazing coach with whom we’ve worked closely in Aldeburgh and at other masterclasses.
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Perhaps the biggest upcoming highlight for us will be embarking on our first Beethoven Cycle. We’ve been invited to Buenos Aires for a residency at the Teatro Colón, where we’ll be performing all the Beethoven quartets during
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two one-month periods, starting in the autumn of 2018. Beethoven has become of very special significance for us since our relationship with Music in the Round began, as the Lindsays and Peter in particular had such a strong emotional connection with his canon of quartets. By knowing Peter for a short but intense time, and having played in the Crucible to such supportive audiences during the last three years, we feel like some of the Lindsay’s heritage has been passed on to us. That makes us feel ready to take this project on. We can’t wait to dive in, and hopefully the fruits of our labour will not only be there for the picking in Argentina, but also in England further down the line. Before that though, we have several competition applications and deadlines to worry about, and lots of other repertoire to learn. In the most immediate future, we have a photo session in Amsterdam with the world famous photographer Marco Borggreve. This has been made possible by Music in the Round, and we’re very excited to be working with such an expert. Hopefully the subjects will be worthy of his artistry.” We’re looking forward to seeing you on 21 October, when we’ll be playing Haydn, Mozart and Brahms at the Crucible Studio Theatre!
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AN UPDATE ON THE BRIDGE SCHEME
This autumn sees the conclusion of our first Bridge string-quartet scheme, and we are looking forward to celebrating the milestone with a concert in the Crucible Studio from the Marmen Quartet on 21 October. The next incarnation of the scheme will begin in 2018 and will help us to achieve something that’s vitally important and long overdue in our industry: the creation of specific opportunities for black and ethnic-minority musicians to come together to make chamber music. Over the coming years, we’ll be facilitating and championing this so that it opens up further pathways for successive generations of musicians in the future. We’re working in partnership with Chi-chi Nwanoku and her Chineke! orchestra – who gave
an extraordinary Prom this summer that you might have seen – and many others from across the industry. Bridge 2 will begin with a residential summer school in Sheffield in summer 2018 (during which you will be invited to attend performances), and we’re currently finalising our plans for how the scheme will continue after that. The scheme will enable us to present an even richer and more diverse programme of music-making, and will make professional musical opportunities open to more people; and we are glad and excited to be embarking on it.
KATE & KATIE Earlier this month Kate Thompson, our Learning & Participation Coordinator, began her maternity leave as she and Peter eagerly await the safe arrival of their daughter in October. We look forward to sharing their good news with you soon!
POLLY AND BILLY GET HITCHED! On Saturday 9 September, Polly Ives married Stuart (known to half the world as Billy) Beaumont in a beautiful ceremony at which their one-year-old son Frank, naturally took a starring role. I’m sure you’ll all join me in sending our love and congratulations to them!
In the meantime we’re delighted to welcome Katie Williamson to the team – she’ll be running this aspect of our work for the coming 12 months. Katie’s a composer and a graduate of the University of Sheffield with lots of experience of music in schools. You’ll meet her at concerts and events in the coming months. Katie says: “I’m really excited to be part of Music in the Round and I’m looking forward to kick-starting our new projects.”
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FUNDING UPDATE
BRIDGE SCHEME FUNDRAISING Thank you to all our Friends who helped and came to the Open Garden event at Park Hall in June, superbly hosted by Kim and Margaret Staniforth. The weather was perfect, the setting beautiful, the singing and the music, courtesy of Lucy Phillips, Fraser Wilson and friends delightful, and the cakes delicious! The idea was originally suggested by Vivien Whitaker, who generously donated three sculptures to support the event. Supported by a hard-working group of Friends, the day raised just under £3,000 for our Bridge scheme and nearly £1,000 for the Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice.
PETER’S CONCERT The Marmen Quartet gave a wonderful concert to a packed St Martin’s Church in Stoney Middleton on 1st September in memory of Peter Cropper. We raised a further £1,000 towards the Bridge scheme whilst enjoying superb performances of Haydn, Beethoven and Ravel quartets.
ARTS COUNCIL FUNDING At the end of June we learnt that our funding application to Arts Council England for standstill funding 2018-22 was successful. Music in the Round will continue as a National Portfolio Organisation, working with the Arts Council to achieve ‘great art and culture for everyone’. We’re delighted that our
programme of work in Sheffield and around the country, including concerts for young and old, and a host of learning and participation activities, has been endorsed and supported in the face of fierce competition.
FUTURE FESTIVALS FUND 2016/17 Friends and supporters have continued to donate to our Future Festivals Fund this financial year with the result that the fund total, including Gift Aid, is nearly £73,000. We had set ourselves the target of £100,000 by 2020 so are thrilled that we are so close to achieving that. Thank you for your support for future fabulous festivals. If you would like to make a donation to this fund, or to support the Bridge Scheme, please get in touch.
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ENSEMBLE 360 ON TOUR THIS AUTUMN, ENSEMBLE 360 STAGE CELEBRATIONS OF SCHUBERT AND MOZART AROUND THE COUNTRY. Doncaster, CAST 13 - 14 October Sensational Schubert Festival A weekend of concerts, workshops and talks for the whole family 01302 303959 www.castindoncaster.com Barnsley, Emmanuel Methodist Church 15 October, 3.00pm SCHUBERT Piano Trio in B flat D.898 SCHUBERT String Quartet in D minor D.810 ‘Death and the Maiden’ 01226 327000 www.barnsleycivic.co.uk 1 December, 7.30pm BRUCH 4 Pieces for Viola, Clarinet and Piano BEETHOVEN Trio op.11 for Clarinet, Bassoon and Piano BERG Duo monologue for clarinet and Bassoon BEETHOVEN Eyeglass duet for Viola and Double Bass JONCOURT Fantasia on Themes from Bellini’s Norma 01226 327000 www.barnsleycivic.co.uk Scarborough, Stephen Joseph Theatre 28-29 October Marvellous Mozart Festival A weekend of concerts, workshops and talks for the whole family
JOIN ENSEMBLE 360 FOR A WEEKEND OF WONDERFUL MUSIC AT THE FAMOUS WIGMORE HALL. London, Wigmore Hall Saturday 3 February, 7.30pm JANACEK Concertino MOZART Quintet in E flat for piano and winds K452 BEETHOVEN Septet in E flat Op.20 Sunday 4 February, 11.30am MARTINU Nonet for wind quintet, string trio and double bass BRAHMS Piano Quintet in F minor Op.34 0207 935 2141 www.wigmore-hall.org.uk
01723 370541 www.sjt.uk.com
4th Floor, Sheffield Central Library, Surrey Street Sheffield S1 1XZ Registered Charity number: 326811 Company number 1880734 VAT number 391 1875 33
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