We had a delightful evening on Sunday with Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Richard Crabtree (violin and viola) encompassing everyone from JS Bach in the early 1720s to Michael Berkeley’s Notes on the loss of a Friend only written in the last few months.
As a short reprise for those of you who were with us on Sunday and a brief taster for those who weren’t – here are Madeleine and Richard playing William Alwyn (1905-85)’s intermezzo from his 1950 Sonata impromptu, Richard playing one movement from Bach’s Cello suite in A arranged for viola, them both playing Judith Weir’s Sleep Sound ida mornin’ from Atlantic Drift and finally Madeleine playing the Michael Berkeley piece which, as she tells us, has a special resonance for her and for Salon Music.
and…..
Anno with Aurora at King’s Place
I fear that I am becoming a bit of an Aurora groupie… I have found every performance of their’s that I have been to so exciting that I now book up almost without looking at the programme. However, I had noticed that last Friday’s concert at King’s Place started with the American composer Caroline Shaw’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings – and I am also a bit of a Caroline Shaw groupie!
I am afraid I cannot show you any of it as I was sitting behind a gentleman with an extremely large head – but I can give you a quick run down. The whole programme was absolutely gripping.
Caroline Shaw was born in 1982 and grew up as a child prodigy in Greenville, North Carolina. She is well-known in early music circles through her parallel career as a performer, both singing and playing baroque violin. A few years ago, the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale commissioned her to write a series of works, which gave her a chance to weave in the sound of the harpsichord. But the new concerto, written for American harpsichordist Byron Schenkman, is her first full-scale piece featuring the instrument.
“What I love about early music” she says”is that the information you’re given on the page is minimal.” She compares the freedom to create between the lines with how pop music works, “where a lot that has to do with vibe and style and articulation is unwritten.”
(With thanks to the Seattle Times.)
Second up, Nico Muhly, also has his musical feet firmly anchored in the past. I had never heard him before but he is an Aurora ‘regular’ and their programme notes comment that ‘some of his most affecting music has involved shimmering instrumental arrangements of the renaissance choral music of his childhood as a boy chorister, shot through with gorgeous harmonic suspensions, deep nostalgia, and a sense of rapture’. All perfections keep (the piece premiered on Friday) was an arrangement for solo trombone and string quartet of the sixteenth-century lute song I saw my lady weep by John Dowland.
And finally, what is it about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? It appears to have an endless fascination for contemporary composers as Anno is Anna Meredith’s reimagining of the piece for strings, harpsichord, electronics – and birdsong.
Aurora are not a group to let a theatrical moment escape them, so Anno opened with a darkened empty stage onto which the ten (?) string players and the harpsichordist slowly filed playing gently as they came. Blue, red and yellow light flooded the upper storeys of the concert hall as the piece progressed – significant sections of ‘the real’ Vivaldi colliding with excerpts that Merdith had edited, looped, deconstructed, re-ordered and re-interpreted, weaving these fragments together with her own interstitial music, drum machine cross-rhythms and sound effects. Mesmerising.
Meanwhile…….
Salon Music Upcoming Concerts
22nd October – Highgate Society Sunday Lunchtime concerts.
The Ladies of the Salons Accompanied by Matt Redman, Patricia Hammond sings parlour songs from the 1830s to the 1930s.
For more information and to buy tickets
4th November – The baroque Spinet
Leading harpsichord player, Nathaniel Mander will be giving his new baroque spinet its very first London outing with us on November 4th.
The next post will be all about Nathaniel and his new spinet……….
For more information and to buy tickets
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