Have you booked yet for Declan and Sophia on Sunday March 17th? Or for the Bassett Horn Ladies on April 8th? Do not delay too long as both are booking up fast.
I am afraid that I cannot encourage you to book for the London Chamber Ensemble on March 8th as we are already sold out but you can go on a waiting list for returns here.
Meanwhile, meet the PCS Samba Band
If you are staging a protest on a grey February day in the pouring rain what you need is Dave Vincent’s PCS Samba Band. Their pulsing rhythms will ward off the most dispiriting of downpours.
But they are a protest band only – they do not do ‘corporate’ or charities – and you will only get them if Dave and his PCS union colleagues approve of your cause. Over the last 13 years they have turned out over 200 times – for International May Day, the Peterloo Massacre commemoration, five UN Anti- Racism Days, 13 Climate Change marches, PRIDE marches, Free Palestine marches and Union strike solidarity marches for RMT, UCU, NEU, RCN, PCS, UNITE – to mention only a few.
Anyone can join the band, the majority of whom are women, and ideally you would be a union member. However, you don’t have to have any drumming experience – and you will only be asked to drum for causes that you support.
Where did I find them? Outside the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday during the two day hearing of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange’s attempt to appeal his extradition to the US. Whether the band will have helped his cause at all, who knows, but they certainly kept us protesters happy and engaged!
Aurora’s Apocalypse!
And then I went to the South Bank for the Aurora Orchestra and Dies Irae.
The Four Horses of the Apocolypse could certainly not have asked for a better drum roll than the opening piece from Moldovan-Austrian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s extraordinary and apocalyptic Dies Irae. A darkened stage, manic shrieking violins, led by Patricia herself and Giacinto Scelsi’s 1968 Okanagon. This was followed by a series of pieces by the German 17th century composer, Heinrich Biber and the American George Crumb who died in 2022 – each as dissonant, scary, exciting and satanic as the one before. Sounds of bones and flutes, Mars, Dance macabre, Devil music, Black angels. Players and instruments came and went on stage, violinists lay on floor – where they played and shouted – trombonists blew their way around the auditorium, bows screeched over gongs…
A five minute respite in the form of a John Dowland lament ws followed by a funeral march transporting a coffin like box onto the stage – which Kopatchinskaja then proceeded to hammer with wooden mallets (see the image), accompanied by eight double basses and a piano. The bizarre 1973 composition of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, a student of Shostakovich.
The concert ended with a darkened stage while the Gregorian Dies Irae chant was intoned by eight singers who slowly processed through auditorium accompanied by eight carriers of single lights and ticking metronomes – the ticking of the time bombs which would finally destroy us?
It was an extraordinarily powerful, if weird, performance. How much of the wonderfully atmospheric staging (in the very unpromising setting of the Queen Elizabeth Hall) was Kopatchinskaja’s and how much Aurora’s, I don’t know, but it was extremely effective.
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