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.