Mozart on the Road: Part 2

7.00pm

Thursday 18 May

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Part 2

SONGS OF TRAVEL

Welcome to our 2022 / 23 season, Songs of Travel. It is the final instalment of our ‘Six Chapters of Enlightenment’ series here at the Southbank Centre.

The idea of a journey excites us all. Whether it is a new adventure or one we have made dozens of times before. Travel and the idea of leaving home left a deep impression on the British and European mindset in the 17th and 18th centuries. And, of course, it is one of the great literary metaphors with the promise of discovering something about ourselves on the way to our destination.

The 18th Century was a whirlwind of correspondences. International navigation was leaping forward with Captain James Cook’s maritime expeditions whilst newspapers, novels and engravings were distributing ideas and images in a manner previously unparalleled. As a result, the

intellectual aspiration of the common man gained a wholly new stride. One which would reach beyond the bounds of the immediate and conventional into new realms of existence: far off lands, radical political thought, belief beyond convention and transports of the artistic soul which would make the desperate leap into the passions and turmoil of romanticism. The song of travel eventually becomes the realisation of self as hero in the flight from non-social space to the strange and wonderful of the 19th century: exoticism, opiate dreams, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural.

The music we’ve selected for the season reflects journeys that are physical and of the mind. It is the work of creative thinkers that were able to imagine unknown places through the descriptions of others, to put the fantastical to use to satirise the contemporary, to reimagine the past in new ways, to explore our individual freedom, our sense of collective belonging, and the need to travel to find their own place in the world, a journey many of us still make today.

Thank you for joining us today and supporting not just the OAE but live performance by the whole cultural community. Music by its very existence is about community and shared journeys, an adventure that looks beyond that which divides us to seek joy in common belief.

In our two Mozart on the Road concerts we perform works by three composers – CPE Bach, JC Bach and WA Mozart – who were also sons of composers and all found that leaving home was the path to creative freedom. They were able to strike out and establish their reputations away from the traditional social network, in part, thanks to the travel and communications revolution of the Enlightenment. If the means to travel had advanced, the mechanisms by which ideas were circulating leapt forward even more dramatically. Newspapers were becoming increasingly common – what we now know as The Times was first published in 1785 – and composers were increasingly able to take control of the commercial dissemination of their work (in no small way due to JC Bach himself, who had won a landmark copyright legal case in 1777). Social change meant that a revolution was under way in the models by which professional musicians operated and audiences experienced music.

The two Bach’s were half-brothers born a little over two decades apart. They represent different phases in the evolution of musical style in the 18th Century and, as Nicholas Kenyon explores in our programme article, took very different approaches to the opportunities that opened up during their lifetimes. The shadow cast by their father, JS Bach, may have led to the importance of their own work being overlooked: neither was second rate, both were effortlessly brilliant and shedding light on these neglected corners is at the core of the OAE’s mission. JC Bach, in particular, should be close to the heart of London concert-goers; he made his home here and made a substantial contribution to public music-making in the city after the death of Handel that we continue to feel the benefits of to the present day.

Mozart, of course, eclipsed his own father in his fame. It is always fascinating to place him within the context of where he came from. In today’s concert we encounter him a few years before we did in Part 1, in his mid-twenties and on the verge of breaking free from the chains of his home town. It is a very real journey that millions of us continue to make today, one that can prove both liberating but also challenging.

There will be a pre-concert talk with Kati Debretzeni and performers from tonight’s concert at 6.00pm in the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer.

Programme

Thursday 18 May 2023

7.00pm at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH (1714 – 1788)

Symphony in F major, Wq. 183/3

Allegro di molto – Larghetto – Presto

Cello Concerto in A major, Wq. 172

Allegro

Largo con sordini, mesto

Allegro assai

Interval

JOHANN CHRISTIAN BACH (1735 – 1782)

Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major, W.C46

Allegro maestoso

Larghetto

Allegro

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791)

Symphony No. 34

Allegro vivace

Andante di molto (più tosto Allegretto)

Finale: Allegro vivace

ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Jean-Guihen Queyras cello

Kati Debretzeni violin/director

This concert is supported by Selina and David Marks

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

Violins I

Kati Debretzeni (director)

Matthew Truscott

Andrew Roberts

Alice Evans

Huw Daniel

Henry Tong

Violins II

Julia Kuhn

Rodolfo Richter

Silvia Schweinberger

Dominika Feher

Daniel Edgar

Nia Lewis

Violas

Anne Sophie van Riel

Martin Kelly

Max Mandel

Kate Heller

Cellos

Luise Buchberger

Andrew Skidmore

Helen Verney

Basses

Christine Sticher

Cecelia Bruggemeyer

Flutes

Lisa Beznosiuk

Neil McLaren

Oboes

Daniel Bates

Leo Duarte

Clarinets

Katherine Spencer

Fiona Mitchell

Bassoons

Christopher Rawley

Zoe Shevlin

Horns

Richard Bayliss

Martin Lawrence

Trumpets

David Blackadder

Phillip Bainbridge

Timpani

Adrian Bending

Harpsichord

Masumi Yamamoto

Three Travellers

For the first concert in this series, we began ‘Mozart on the Road: Part 1’ at Victoria Station, and found a house which the Mozarts had stayed in on their many travels. For this concert, we are starting from a different London terminus and setting out from St Pancras International. You only have to walk a few yards north of the station on Pancras Road to reach, on the right, Old St Pancras Church and its associated graveyard. This is one of the earliest Christian sites in the capital: the building itself is a nineteenth century confection, albeit ancient in style, but the atmospheric cemetery where Thomas

Hardy worked still retains its attractiveness as the largest green space in the busy area.

To your left as you enter is a tall memorial in the form of a sundial. And propped up on the ground on the left of that memorial is a faded plaque, honouring the composer Johann Christian Bach, who was buried in the churchyard on his death in 1782. His grave has long disappeared, probably a victim of the building of the Midland Railway in the nineteenth century, long before the massive Eurostar link arrived in the twentyfirst. But the memorial plaque remains: why is it here?

Nicholas Kenyon

St Pancras Old Church by Matt Brown from London, England (licensed for reuse under cc-by-sa/2.0)

Johann Christian Bach, born in 1735 in Leipzig, the last surviving son of JS Bach and his second wife Anna Magdalena, is a leading example of how in the second half of the eighteenth century, travel and movement across Europe became a vital part of composers’ lives. We recall that Johann Sebastian himself never worked outside the small German state of Thuringia (though if legend is to be believed, he walked the 260 miles to Lübeck to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ and direct his music). The Bach family, deriving from the exiled Hungarian Veit Bach, who came to Thuringia, was a tight-knit dynasty which met together annually in one or other of the local cities where they worked; they sang chorales and then folk songs, telling jokes and improvising a mixture of melodies in a quodlibet (a form which JS Bach immortalised in the last variation of his Goldberg Variations). The sense of close family identity among the Bachs of Sebastian’s generation is vivid and touching.

By contrast, Johann Christian made his career in Italy, where he became a Catholic, played the organ in Milan, and then travelled to London where he wrote operas, found favour with Queen Charlotte and entered the royal service. He met the young Mozart and had a significant influence on his emerging

musical style. With the composer Carl Friedrich Abel he founded a famous (but not always financially successful) series, the Bach-Abel concerts in the Hanover Square Rooms. Just as Leopold Mozart had moved out of the centre of London to Chelsea for better air, so the ill Johann Christian moved to Paddington in the year before his death. When he died St Pancras Churchyard was the appropriate place for his grave, though contemporary reports suggest that he was soon forgotten as musical fashion changed.

His elder half-brother Carl Philip Emanuel (who was the fifth child of JS Bach’s first wife Maria Barbara) took a different route away from the family, and worked for Frederick the Great in Berlin for some thirty years. His devotion to his father was

Italy, Bologna, Portrait of Johann Christian Bach. Germany – 18th century. © A. Dagli Orti / © NPL –DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images

Gravestone in St Pancras Old Church yard marked Johann Christian Bach German composer by Pru.mitchell (licensed under cc-by-sa/4.0)

1714 – 14 December 1788 Postcard.

however considerable: he brought him to visit the flute-playing monarch Frederick in the famous incident which gave rise to Sebastian’s Musical Offering. He spent a great deal of time collating the family history and wrote the obituary of his father. There is one somewhat sarcastic note at the end of the invaluable family tree that Emanuel compiled: writing of his younger half-brother Johann Christian Bach, he says ‘among us, he has managed differently from honest old Veit!’

Was that a remark prompted by envy at JC Bach’s success in London, or simply a reflection on the very different ways of life that composers followed as the world changed in the eighteenth century?

Another, maybe apocryphal jesting remark was made by Johann Christian about his brother: ‘He lives to compose, I compose to live’ --which highlights the presence of the ‘London Bach’ in the commercial marketplace. In either case, these comments point up the differences in musical style developed by these two leading members of the Bach clan which we will hear demonstrated tonight: Johann Christian, fluent, attractive, productive; Carl Philip Emanuel, sharp, passionate, provocative. Those are over-simplifications, of course, there is considerable crossinfluence in their music, and the reputations of the two have fluctuated fascinatingly as their music has begun to be revived. The habitual view of the ‘serious’ writers of a previous generation was that CPE was the great original, whereas JC’s music was ‘facile and decadent’. But then the balance swung: Basil Lam once harshly wrote that CPE’s ‘paradoxes are the tooeasy surprises of a style where anything may happen’. I was very struck by the comments of HC Robbins Landon, who revised CS Terry’s pioneering biography of Johann Christian in 1967, that while Emanuel’s music had ‘bursts of fantasy and even genius’, it was Johann Christian who was ‘better balanced’, ‘far more in the mainstream’ and had a greater impact on the music of the time.

Surely now, with the increasing diversification of the repertory and the abandonment of the idea of a single, right way forward for music, we can regard both of them as making a distinctive contribution to the broadening of idiom, in the fascinating melting-pot that was the music of mideighteenth-century Europe, as the ‘classical’ style emerged gradually and fitfully from the ‘baroque’. It would be hard to find a better example of Emanuel’s thrilling impact than the opening of his F major Symphony (one of four published in 1780): a unison line for the strings, a trill, a diminished seventh,

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach-portrait of German composer. The second of eleven sons of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach. 8 March

Lebrecht Music Arts / Bridgeman Images

and a pause. What next? The same again, building with jagged edges to an outburst from the orchestra that conjures up the world of the Sturm und drang, storm and stress, echoing the literary movement of the time. The energy is relentless, broken only by aspiring chromatic phrases for the violins. Then listen for the sudden astonishing end to the movement as it collapses into glassy slow notes to change key and prepare the short central Larghetto that follows, led off unusually by the violas. Through to the final Presto, with its sudden dynamic contrasts, stops and starts, these surprises are all superbly well-planned.

Less startling, though equally well-judged and innovative, is the Cello Concerto in A major, written in Potsdam in 1753, and perhaps intended not for the court of Frederick the Great but for musical societies in Potsdam or Berlin. The innovation here is that writing concertos for the cello was unusual for the time (Vivaldi, that great concerto generator, wrote some for cello but more for the bassoon as solo bass instrument), and the writer Johann Quantz had warned that ‘those who wish to distinguish themselves in this manner must be provided by nature with fingers that are long and have strong tendons, permitting an extended stretch’. Simon Heighes has suggested the Bohemian cellist Ignaz Mara, a member of Frederick the Great’s chamber music group, as a possible performer since he was reportedly ‘an excellent soloist on his instrument, his tone and execution extremely impressive’.

One curiosity of the concerto is that it survives in other versions, for flute and for keyboard, but it now seems likely that these were derived from this cello original, which is ideally well suited to the instrument. Its somewhat galant style provides a direct comparison with Johann Christian’s Sinfonia Concertante in B flat that follows. This is a fascinating survival

since the score was thought for a long time to be lost, and was not able to be included in the modern published collection of those sinfonias which are among Johann Christian’s most distinctive contributions to the idiom of the time. A copy surfaced in 1996; Ernest Warburton, who found and edited it, placed it in the late 1770s, written for the Bach-Abel concerts in London, with probable soloists Wilhelm Cramer (violin) and James Cervetto (cello). An intriguing similarity to Emanuel’s concerto is that the central Larghetto is begun by the violas and second violins, while here the solo cello remains silent throughout, leaving the violin to weave its eloquence in deeply-felt solos; this is not superficial music.

While the Bachs made their impact around Europe, Wolfgang Mozart was working up to his own dramatic move from his home town of Salzburg to the challenges of a freelance life in Vienna. The same year as Emanuel’s Symphony in F was published, Mozart completed his Symphony No 34 in C on 29 August, and the next year took it with him to Vienna. If this exuberant piece is a farewell to Salzburg and its restrictive atmosphere, it does not sound like it. Indeed it breathes the same open, accessible spirit as JC Bach’s music, while echoing some of CPE Bach’s subtlety. The balance of the themes and their development in the first movement is well managed: there is a long and brooding section which veers into the minor key and ends in A flat before the movement gradually pulls itself together again. One author called this section ‘Schumannesque’; in our context we can hear it as Mozart pushing the bounds of the tonal structure of his music in the most exciting way. The central Andante di molto is a sotto voce eloquent duet for the violins, while the final Allegro vivace is a perpetuum mobile whose whirring exuberance propels Mozart into a new life, and music into a new age.

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Biographies

Since 2008 she is one of the leaders of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and has collaborated with Simon Rattle, Adam and Ivan Fischer, András Schiff, William Christie, Ottavio Dantone, Vladimir Jurowski, Maxim Emelyanychev and Ricardo Minasi. She has directed the group from the violinist’s chair in works ranging from Baroque repertoire to Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Berlioz, and has recorded Vivaldi’s Four Seasons following performances in collaboration with the Henri Oguike Dance Company.

Kati Debretzeni

A fourth generation musician, Kati Debretzeni began playing the violin with Sofia Szabó in her native Romania, finishing her studies with Ora Shiran in Israel.

Her passion for historical performance took her to London, where she studied the Baroque violin with Catherine Mackintosh and Walter Reiter.

Since the year 2000 Kati leads the English Baroque Soloists under John Eliot Gardiner, with whom she has performed the world over. Her playing can be heard in the group’s recordings of J.S. Bach’s cantatas (recorded live during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage 2000), the Brandenburg concertos and the more recent recordings of the Mass in B Minor, the St Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s operas. In 2018 she recorded violin concertos by JS Bach with the orchestra to critical acclaim, including her own arrangement of BWV 1053. In 2022 she performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante conducted by Gardiner in the US, UK and Italy.

Kati is in demand internationally as leader, soloist and director with groups such as Zefiro (Italy), Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra (Israel), Barokkanerne (Norway), Les Siècles and Amaryllis (France), Victoria Baroque (Canada) and the Budapest Bach Consort (Hungary).

A keen chamber musician, Kati has recorded award-winning CDs with Ricordo and Florilegium. In the last decade she is a member of Trio Goya.

As teacher, Kati has given masterclasses in the UK, Germany, Italy, Norway, Canada, Israel and Hungary. In 2022 she was invited to devise a programme of Baroque performance studies for string players at the Buchman Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv. She is on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and her former students make music the world over.

Jean-Guihen Queyras

Curiosity, diversity and a firm focus on the music itself characterize the artistic work of Jean Guihen Queyras. Whether on stage or on record, one experiences an artist dedicated completely and passionately to the music, whose humble and quite unpretentious treatment of the score reflects its clear, undistorted essence. The inner motivations of composer, performer and audience must all be in tune with one another in order to bring about an outstanding concert experience: JeanGuihen Queyras learnt this interpretative approach from Pierre Boulez, with whom he established a long artistic partnership. This philosophy, alongside a flawless technique and a clear, engaging tone, also shapes Jean-Guihen Queyras’ approach to every performance and his absolute commitment to the music itself.

His approaches to early music – as in his collaborations with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin – and to contemporary music are equally thorough. He has given world

premieres of works by, among others, Ivan Fedele, Gilbert Amy, Bruno Mantovani, Michael Jarrell, Johannes-Maria Staud, Thomas Larcher and Tristan Murail. Conducted by the composer, he recorded Peter Eötvös’ Cello Concerto to mark his 70th birthday in November 2014.

Jean-Guihen Queyras was a founding member of the Arcanto Quartet and forms a celebrated trio with Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov; the latter is, alongside Alexandre Tharaud, a regular accompanist. He has also collaborated with zarb specialists Bijan and Keyvan Chemirani on a Mediterranean programme.

The versatility in his music-making has led to many concert halls, festivals and orchestras inviting Jean-Guihen to be Artist in Residence, including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Vredenburg Utrecht, De Bijloke Ghent and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg.

Jean-Guihen Queyras often appears with renowned orchestras such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, working with conductors such as Iván Fischer, Philippe Herreweghe, Yannick NézetSéguin, François-Xavier Roth, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Roger Norrington.

Jean-Guihen Queyras’ discography is impressive. His recordings of cello concertos by Edward Elgar, Antonín Dvořák, Philippe Schoeller and Gilbert Amy

have been released to critical acclaim. As part of a harmonia mundi project dedicated to Schumann, he has recorded the complete piano trios with Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov and at the same time the Schumann cello concerto with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Pablo Heras-Casado. The recording “THRACE - Sunday Morning Sessions“ explores, in collaboration with the Chemirani brothers and Sokratis Sinopoulos, the intersections of contemporary music, improvisation and Mediterranean traditions. The 2022 / 23 season includes CD releases for the recording of works by composer Marin Marais with Alexandre Tharaud, as well as a release of the first recording by the “Invisible Stream” ensemble consisting of Jean-Guihen Queyras, Raphaël Imbert, Pierre-François Blanchard and Sonny Troupé. Jean-Guihen Queyras records exclusively for Harmonia Mundi.

Highlights in the 2022 / 23 season include concerts with his ensembles “Invisible

Stream” and “Thrace”, concert tours to Australia, Japan and Canada, invitations from the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Bochumer Symphoniker, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, as well as chamber music concerts with Alexander Melnikov, Jörg Widmann, the Belcea Quartet, the Quatuor Modigliani and Isabelle Faust. Alongside Yuja Wang, Jean-Guihen Queyras has been selected as Spotlight Artist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for the upcoming season and will also be Resident Artist at the Cello Biennale Amsterdam.

Jean-Guihen Queyras holds a professorship at the University of Music Freiburg and is Artistic Director of the “Rencontres Musicales de HauteProvence” festival in Forcalquier. He plays a 1696 instrument by Gioffredo Cappa, made available to him by the Mécénat Musical Société Générale.

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In 1986, a group of inquisitive London musicians took a long hard look at that curious institution we call the Orchestra, and decided to start again from scratch. They began by throwing out the rulebook. Put a single conductor in charge? No way. Specialise in repertoire of a particular era? Too restricting. Perfect a work and then move on? Too lazy. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was born.

And as this distinctive ensemble playing on period-specific instruments began to get a foothold, it made a promise to itself. It vowed to keep questioning, adapting and inventing as long as it lived. Residencies at the Southbank Centre and the Glyndebourne Festival didn’t numb its experimentalist bent. A major record deal didn’t iron out its quirks. Instead, the OAE examined musical notes with ever more freedom and resolve.

That creative thirst remains unquenched. The Night Shift series of informal performances are redefining concert formats. Its former home at London’s Kings Place has fostered further diversity of planning and music-making. The ensemble has formed the bedrock for some of Glyndebourne’s most groundbreaking recent productions.

In keeping with its values of always questioning, challenging and trailblazing, in September 2020, the OAE became the resident orchestra of Acland Burghley School, Camden. The residency – a first for a British orchestra – allows the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to live, work and play amongst the students of the school.

Now more than thirty years old, the OAE is part of our musical furniture. It has even graced the outstanding conducting talents of John Butt, Elder, Adam Fischer, Iván Fischer, Jurowski, Rattle and Schiff with a joint title of Principal Artist. But don’t ever think the ensemble has lost sight of its founding vow. Not all orchestras are the same. And there’s nothing quite like this one.

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A programme to involve, empower and inspire

Early Years and Key Stage 1 Programmes

The Spring Term is a peak time for our work in schools for Early Years (up to 5 years old) and Key Stage 1 (KS1, pupils from 5 to 7 years old) with workshops and concerts from south to north.

The King of the Sea project introduces children at schools in our five partner boroughs in London – Camden, Brent, Merton, Wandsworth and Ealing – to the music of Handel and Purcell through an environment-themed story. On board the Sailboat Malarkey, our young adventurers meet Poseidon, the King of the Sea, who is jealously guarding his treasure chest. This turns out to be the junk people on land have thrown away, but we discover how it can be given a second life being recycled as instruments to make music.

Over 650 KS1 pupils in our partner London boroughs took part in The Magic of Mozart project. This delivers

a workshop with OAE players in each participating school followed by attending a concert. Pupils learn about the different instruments and sounds of the orchestra and explore music including Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 and a participatory version of his ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ variations (arranged by James Redwood).

In addition, the team has travelled for residencies in York and County Durham to work in schools and give performances of The King of the Sea and Papageno and the Bird That Would Be Free. Our educational residencies also create opportunities for engaging with communities more widely. As part of our ongoing work in North Norfolk we have given a chamber concert in North Walsham, whilst our work in County Durham and York will see events as part of the Durham Vocal Festival, concerts at the University of York and a family concert at the National Centre for Early Music.

OAE Educational Activity in 2023

Principal Residency at Acland Burghley School

Acland Burghley School is a home for our players, staff and governance. It is also a crucial hub for our educational programme. Here we engage students in a range of different programmes that support curricular and extra-curricular activity from dance projects to our own unique jamming sessions, Musical Connections, and our Dreamchasing Young Producers programme. We bring the school community into our musical world through workshops, access to rehearsals and concerts and carefully curated Encounter Sessions where students have their own unique introduction to the OAE.

National Residencies

For many years, the OAE has been committed to a national programme of engagement in underserved communities. In 2023, that work continues in key residencies in North Walsham, Ipswich, York, Durham and King’s Lynn with community concerts, workshops, programmes for early years (TOTS), and specially curated programmes for schools (The Magic Flute and The Life of the Sea) based on the core repertoire of the OAE.

In London Schools

The OAE has long-established relationships with many schools across London. In harmony with the national plan, the OAE will offer The Magic of Mozart and The Life of the Sea to young people from Camden, Brent, Merton, Wandsworth and Ealing.

Special Needs

A key priority for the OAE Education team is to respond meaningfully to the additional educational needs of young people. We are proud to be working with students at Swiss Cottage Special School, Camden, and Thomas Worsley Special School, Ipswich, as part of the Musical Connections project that is also a crucial component of our residency at Acland Burghley School.

Alongside a choir of 1,500 in a musical spectacular (Something Special) at the Royal Albert Hall, we will be sharing music created by young people from Great Ormond Street and University College Hospital Schools as well as students from Swiss Cottage Special School.

For Families

Throughout the year, we present specially curated events for families. These include OAE TOTS concerts at the Southbank Centre (Pack Your Bags), OAE TOTS FUNharmonics workshops with the LPO and The Magic Flute at the York Rise Street Party in our home borough of Camden.

Developing Young Talent

The OAE is committed to developing the next generation of talent in the following programmes:

OAE Experience scheme to help aspiring young professional musicians develop in historically informed performance practice.

OAE Rising Stars is a biennial competitive programme for debutant singers, offering high-profile opportunities with the OAE on the international stage.

Suffolk Young Strings Project is a project to encourage players to create new compositions inspired by baroque music.

Our participants come from a wide range of backgrounds and we pride ourselves in working flexibly, adapting to the needs of local people and the places where they live. The extensive partnerships we have built up over many years ensure maximum and lasting impact.

We take inspiration from the OAE’s repertoire, instruments and players. This makes for a vibrant, challenging and engaging programme where everyone is involved; players, animateurs, composers, participants, teachers, partners and supporters all have a valued voice.

We do hope you can join us for some of these events! Please contact us if you would like further details on how to attend or support these projects.

11.00am

Saturday 10 June

Assembly Hall (The Hex)

Acland Burghley School

£2 (children) / £5 (adults)

Pack your bags!

Join us for a trans-European musical adventure for the small people and their companions.

Our Tots family concerts return to our explorer base in Tufnell Park. Join us and composer Raph Clarkson as we climb aboard his scooter and set off on our journey. We start at home and then fly like the wind around Italy and France.

Bring your clapping hands, singing voices and stamping feet for this lively concert for 2 – 5 year olds and their parents and carers. Let’s go!

Our work at Acland Burghley School

In September 2020, we took up permanent residence at Acland Burghley School in Camden, North London. The residency –a first for a British orchestra – allows us to live, work and play amongst the students of the school.

Three offices have been adapted for our administration team. We use the Grade II-listed school assembly hall as a rehearsal space, with plans to refurbish it under the school’s ‘A Theatre for All’ project. The school isn’t just our landlord or physical home. Instead, it allows us to build on twenty years of work in the borough through OAE’s long-standing partnership with Camden Music. Having already worked in eighteen of the local primary schools that feed into ABS, the plans moving forward are to support music and arts across the school into the wider community. Our move underpins our core enlightenment mission of universal engagement, of access without frontiers.

What do backflips, smoke machines and baroque drums all have in common?

Answer: our first video collaboration with Acland Burghley students. We teamed up with year 10 students who performed a dance that they choreographed for their GCSE exam, accompanied by us performing Rameau’s ‘Danse des

Sauvages’ from Les Indes Galantes. After taking inspiration from baroque dances on YouTube and being drawn to the distinctive rhythmic pulse in the Rameau, the pupils sparked enthusiastic discussion with our players to allow the choreography and music to evolve hand in hand. They also had their say in the direction and recording of the music video, which you can watch on our YouTube channel.

We brought The Moon Hares, an opera for young families which we commissioned in 2019, into the school hall and performed it alongside pupils from ABS as well as Gospel Oak and Kentish Town primary schools. The electrifying performance included music both old and new, with sections from Purcell’s 17th century opera Dioclesian mixed with original, modern music by James Redwood.

There’s also been a bustle of activity away from the camera in our ongoing private classroom education. We’ve delivered numerous interactive workshops for all students in Years 7, 8 and 9, including an exploration of the orchestra’s instruments, illustrated sessions on blues and jazz compositional techniques as part of curriculum studies and a study a day for all GCSE music students on Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.4.

Dreamchasing Young Producers

The value of our residency in Acland Burghley School can be realised in many ways beyond the immediate practice of orchestral musicianship.

One of the key objectives in our mission is to lift aspirations and broaden horizons for life beyond school. We want to help students leave school with richer CVs and stronger professional prospects.

One great way to do that is to mentor the next generation in all those things we have learned as an organisation. At the start of the 2021 / 2022 school year, we launched our Young Producers’ programme in which we offer mentoring, training and work-placement apprenticeship so that the young people in our new community acquire essential skills in management and production, from budgets, compliance and risk assessment to camera operation and stage design.

We are proud of our first cohort, who have already learned so much and become a key part of our working routine. They will one day graduate as accredited producers

and become the mentors, at our side, for future recruits.

More than just an extra-curricular enterprise, this is a programme that we expect to connect with sixth-form education in the new government T Level examination programme.

Young Producers

Armin Eorsi

Harvey O’Brien

Iremide Onibonoje

Jessica Sexton-Smith

Matas Juskevicius

Michael Hau

Nathan Kilby

Raphael Thornton

Riley Silver

Sidney Crossing

Sophia Vainshtok

Tom Cohen

Daniel Miliband

Jaeden Ferritto

Sacha Cross

Daniel Wilton-Ely

Ines Whitaker

Alex Parry

Welcome to the Southbank Centre

We’re the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation’s top visitor attractions, showcasing the world’s most exciting artists at our venues in the heart of London. We’re here to present great cultural experiences that bring people together, and open up the arts to everyone.

The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery, National Poetry Library and Arts Council Collection. We’re one of London’s favourite meeting spots, with lots of free events and places to relax, eat and shop next to the Thames.

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Become a Friend!

Without the generosity of our Friends, the OAE would not exist. When you become an OAE Friend, you join us in bringing great music to life. We then give you a front-row and behind-the-scenes view of our work, so that you can see the impact that your donation really makes.

This includes supporting our ambitious season of concert performances, digital

Friend - £50

• Personalised ticket booking through the OAE box office with bespoke ticket delivery options, easy exchange refunds, and no booking fees

• Priority booking for concerts at the Southbank Centre

• An invitation to the Annual Friends Trip*

productions on OAE Player, improving access to music through our Education programme, and our community work at Acland Burghley School.

Whether you wish to watch the rehearsals or get to know the players, a Friends membership offers a heightened OAE concert-going experience and allows you to support the orchestra you love.

• Invitations to at least three Open Rehearsals during the Southbank Centre season, free of charge

• Access to private Friends Area at OAE concerts at the Southbank Centre

• Updates from the Orchestra with regular newsletters and season brochure mailings

Supporting Friend - £100

All Friend benefits, plus:

• Invitations to at least 5 Open Rehearsals during the Southbank Centre season, free of charge

• Invitation to a Friends’ Season Preview with our players and CEO, to hear about our upcoming plans*

Silver Friend - £500

All Bronze Friend benefits, plus:

• A chance to win two tickets to an OAE Dress Rehearsal at Glyndebourne

Festival Opera

• Invitations to additional daytime and evening OAE rehearsals

* Additional costs may apply

Bronze Friend - £250

All Supporting Friend benefits, plus:

• Credit in OAE Southbank Centre Programmes, Digital Programmes, and on the OAE website

• An invitation to an annual interval champagne reception with OAE players

Gold Friend - £750

All Silver Friend benefits, plus:

• An invitation to the launch of the OAE’s Southbank Centre season*

• Opportunity to join OAE players on tour abroad, with a bespoke programme of activity for our supporters*

To become a Friend, scan the QR code, visit oae.co.uk/support-us or contact us at development@oae.co.uk or 020 8159 9317

2023/24 Season

HAYDN First and Last

Wednesday 25 October

BACH Christmas Oratorio

Saturday 2 December,

Sunday 3 December

THE FAIRY QUEEN: THREE WISHES

Wednesday 17 January

MOZART Love is in the air

Thursday 22 February

BACH Easter Oratorio

Wednesday 27 March

SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5

Wednesday 3 April

MENDELSSHON

The Complete Symphonies

Wednesday 24 April

Thursday 25 April

Friday 26 April

COMING UP... or Castle Adamant

For our season finale we venture to the semi-fictional world of Princess Ida, for conductor John Wilson’s fresh take on Gilbert & Sullivan’s thorny 1884 comic opera.

Princess Ida has forsworn men and set up a women only university at Castle Adamant. Her childhood betrothed, Prince Hilarion, is determined not to be denied his ‘right’. He enters the University in disguise with two friends. What follows is a series of inter-sex machinations as each camp attempts to settle matters in their favour.

Sullivan produced some of his most sublime music in this opera, including the so-called ‘string of pearls’ in Act II featuring the exquisite quartet ‘The world is but a broken toy’.

Cast includes: Sophie Bevan as Princess Ida; Benjamin Hulett as Prince Hilarion; Robert Hayward as King Hildebrand; Simon Butteriss as King Gama / Narrator; Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Lady Blanche; Bethany HorakHallett as Lady Psyche; Marlena Devoe as Melissa; Ruairi Bowen as Cyril; Charles Rice as Florian; Morgan Pearse as Arac; Robert Davies as Guron; Jonathan Brown as Scynthius and Claire Ward as Sacharissa. With Greg Beardsell as chorus master and John Wilson as conductor.

7.00pm Wednesday 7 & Thursday 8 June

Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall