Elena Urioste and Tom Poster
With a venue like the St Pancras Clock Tower and artists like Elena Urioste and Tom Poster, Vermeer Chamber concerts was pretty much guaranteed a fabulous concert last week – and fabulous it was.
Tom and Elena, pianist and violinist, got married early in 2020 – and immediately lost their honeymoon to the Lock Down. But not just their honeymoon. Gone too was any chance of performing for the foreseeable future. But, between them they had a ready made chamber duo. So, they set about creating their own on line concert series, the UriPosteJukeBox, featuring Elena on her violin and Tom ‘as pianist, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, writer, backing dancer and snowman’! Over the next year they worked their way through 88 days of on-line performances garnering an enthusiasitc world wide audience and, in due course, taking requests for both performances and for arrangements of music of every colour and hue – hence the Juke Box.
Although the need for the on-line performces has now, thankfully, disappeared, they have subsequently recorded The Juke Box Album – and sometimes give Juke Box performances to lucky audiences like us.
While there were brief appearances from Grieg and Dvorak, the vast majority of the evening was devoted to the great show songs of the mid 20th century some in their original arrangements, some arranged by Tom. Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso, Rogers and Hammerstein’s Some Enchanted Evening, Piaf’s La Vie en Rose, Harold Arlen’s Somewhere over the Rainbow… Wonderful songs but made so much more wonderful by being stunningly played – and played with love, conviction and the most infectious enjoyment. What a delight! Congratulations to Sijie at Vermeer for having invited them.
More Vermeer to come
I am afraid you have all missed Tom and Elena but…. there are two more Vermeer chamber concerts to come this year.
15th April at Burgh House – Homesick in the USA
Benjamin Marquise Gilmore and Sijie Chen (violin), Hannah Shaw (viola) and Christopher Graves (cello) come together to explore three diverse and colourful string quartets composed by homesick Europeans in the USA. Book here.
May 16th at Leighton House – Schubert Octet & Songs of Inspiration
The Bloomsbury Players perform Schubert’s Octet on historical instruments, plus specially commissioned arrangements of the songs that inspired his instrumental chamber music. This concert is being supported by the wonderful Continuo Foundation. Book here.
Back in Hampstead Lane….
Our Noel Coward evening earlier this week was a huge and delightful success – more anon.
And indeed, more to come on the Beethoven trios along with booking details for this year’s Islington Festival.
Meanwhile, after an extremely busy spring, Salon Music is going to take a break for the next couple of months.
We’ll be back in June with our garden opening on June 21st (more to come about that too) and, hopefully, a jazz concert in the garden in July.
And then the autumn season…..
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