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A flurry of releases recently both as pianist and arranger........ London Soloists Ensemble Released on 28th April by Naxos - Quintets by Vaughan Williams. Emma Johnson and John Lenehan Released on 15th April by Champs Hill Records - Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano by Prokofiev, Rota and Hindemith. Arrangements released by DECCA recently.....
It's a useful exercise assessing a year's work from an objective point of view. If, like me, you perform for a living you will know that that old motto "you are only as good as your last concert" might be true but it has little bearing on the number of dates that are in your diary at the beginning of each year. The past year has, at it happens, been around my average for the number of concerts and much better than average for studio recordings (and whatever people are saying about the apparently desperate state of classical music, CDs are still being produced in large quantities!) Concerts - 45 Recordings - 7 Arrangements - 20 Adjudications - 3 New larger works added to repertoire - 20 Dozens of new smaller works As well as my regular partners I also worked (either as performer or arranger) with the following for the first time (and hopefully not the last!) this year..... Raphaël Mouterde (producer) Nick Korth (Principal Horn in BBCSO) Richard Harvey (composer) Alisa Weilerstein (Cello) Tim Jackson (Principal Horn in RLPO) Joseph Calleja (Tenor) Christian Poltera (Cello) Michael Ponder (producer) Robert Max (Cello) Victor Reyes (composer) Stéphane Tétreault (Cello) Stephanie Marshall (Mezzo-Soprano) Nobuko Imai (Viola) Frans Helmerson (Cello) Yuja Wang (piano) Leonidas Kavakos (Violin) discovered that the recording was on Boxing Day. Having firmly switched off for Christmas I might have had second thoughts - but not for those two! The arrangement was duly delivered on 23rd and recorded in Germany on the 26th. How's that for a turn around?
On Sunday 3rd November at 7.00 there is a very special concert to be held in the Duke's Hall at the Royal Academy of Music. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the London Cello Society,there will be a gathering of some of the world’s greatest Stradivari cellos and an amazing bunch of cellists to play them. During the evening Charles Beare will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the LCS Artistic Adviser Steven Isserlis and I will be accompanying the following players in a variety of short pieces to show off these magnificent instruments. The concert finishes with some arrangements for all cellos together. (See the full programme here).
Christian Poltéra, the ‘Mara’ (1711) Danjulo Ishizaka, the ‘Lord Aylesford’ (1696) Raphael Wallfisch, the ‘Archinto’ (1689) Julian Lloyd-Webber, the ‘Barjansky’ (1690) Paul Silverthorne, the ‘Archinto’ viola (1696) Robert Max, the ‘Saveuse’ (1726) Stéphane Tétreault the ‘Countess of Stanlein’ (1707) This will be my second concert that same day as at 3.00 I will be playing piano quartets by Mozart, Brahms and Stanford at St. John's Smith Square with the London Soloists Ensemble! More details are here...... http://www.londonsoloistsensemble.co.uk/diary.html
In his early years he covered the length and breath of the country several times over together with a troop of performers giving performances similar to this one in Stamford:
The new recording features a collection of these songs transcribed for violin and piano and a suite of four pieces for violin and piano. The real discoveries for me however where the violin sonata and the second of his two piano sonatas - both works of great power and emotional depth. Gruodis lived through turbulent times as his country, which was under the of the Russian Empire at the turn 20th century, was re-established as a democratic state after the first World War, then occupied by both Soviet Union and Germany briefly during and after the second. Eventually absorbed once again into the Soviet Union until independence in the 1990s, it's no wonder that Gruodis was infuenced by native musical influences and is seen as a nationalist composer in the line of Bartok and Janacek. He did indeed collect folk song and absorbed its atmosphere into his mature music, but in both of the sonatas it is the Germanic influence of his studies in Leipzig which gives the music its cogency and fluidity. Gruodis was the first Lithuanian composer to write regularly for orchestra. Here is a late work - his Symphonic Variations. In due course I will post some of the new recording.
This is the first of five CDs I have recorded as pianist this year. The others (due out in the coming months) are a disc with Emma Johnson of sonatas (Prokofiev, Rota and Hindemith), a recording of Vaughan Williams chamber music with the London Soloists Ensemble, piano music by Richard Harvey and a disc of music by the Romantic Lithuanian composer Juozas Gruodis including his second piano sonata.
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