CLScapades http://cls.posterous.com City of London Sinfonia blog posterous.com Thu, 05 Jul 2012 03:40:00 -0700 Retrospect - June in pictures http://cls.posterous.com/retrospect-june-2012 http://cls.posterous.com/retrospect-june-2012

June was a busy month for us with the start of our ninth season at Opera Holland Park, a UK premiere of Gluck's Il trionfo di Clelia at the Royal Opera House and several education projects inbetween. We started the month in good spirits celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in style with our friends at Piano House and finished by humming along to Donizetti, Mozart and Puccini.

Here's a few pictures from the past month...

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Gillian and Alex raise their cups for the Diamond Jubilee

 

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Watching Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor which opened this year's Opera Holland Park 2012 season

 

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Gillian, our Education Manager, received a new instrument to add to her collection

 

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A few of our players performing at Great Ormond Street Hospital

 

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Preparing the set for Clelia at the Linbury Studio Theatre, downstairs at the Royal Opera House

 

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Rehearsing for Il Trionfo di Clelia

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Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:26:00 -0800 Composer Focus: Igor Stravinsky http://cls.posterous.com/composer-focus-igor-stravinsky http://cls.posterous.com/composer-focus-igor-stravinsky

Ahead of our performance of Stravinsky's Mass with the Holst Singers at Wednesday's CLoSer, we profile the composer, one of the most innovative of the twentieth century.

 

Stravinsky

Born on 18 June 1882, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky spent much of his childhood in St Petersburg, where his father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a famous bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre. The young Stravinsky studied law for several years, before switching to study music privately with the celebrated Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1909, he found fame with his composition The Firebird, which Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes in Paris, encouraged him to transform into a full-length ballet.

In 1910, Stravinsky moved to Paris and was commissioned by Diagilev to write further ballets for the Ballets Russes. Petrushka, set in a Russian fairground, followed The Firebird. Stravinsky’s next ballet, The Rite of Spring, which premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913, received one of the most notorious reactions in the history of classical music, when it was booed and ridiculed by the audience. Fist fights and catcalls greeted the highly unconventional choreography, instrumentation and use of dissonance in the orchestra. The police were called to attempt to quell what quickly became a riot.

Some believe that the scale of the unrest was exaggerated by Dagliev and Stravinsky, who courted controversy and desired to be seen as innovators. However, The Rite of Spring undoubtedly broke new ground in composition. Its story is based on a ‘primitive,’ pagan ceremony, and it contains challenging and stirring rhythms of early pagan Russia. It was to remain Stravinsky’s most famous work, and established his reputation as a premier composer of the twentieth century.

From Paris, Stravinsky, his wife Katerina and young children moved to Switzerland, where they spent the war years, returning in 1920. In this period, Stavinsky began to experiment with the inflections, harmonies and rhythms of jazz, and later, turned to a neo-classical style with, for example, his ballet Pulcinella (1919-1920) and his choral work the Symphony of Psalms (1930).  In the 1930s, he began to develop professional relationships with key figures in American music. Following the worst couple of years of his life (beginning with the death of his eldest daughter Ludmila in 1938, the death of his mother in 1939, and, finally, the death of his wife of thirty three years, Katerina, from tuberculosis also in 1939), Stravinsky decided to move to the United States with Vera de Bosset, with whom he had been having an affair since 1921. They married in 1940.

Stravinsky became a naturalised US citizen in 1945, the third nationality he had taken in his life (after Russian and French). He socialised with a crowd of European intellectuals and artists in Los Angeles, including the British writers W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas and Aldous Huxley. His Mass was also produced during this time (1944-1948) and is written with a French and Russian-sounding, neo-classical aesthetic. However, after meeting Robert Craft, the musicologist who would go on to live with him as an interpreter, chronicler, and assistant conductor for the rest of his life, he began to be more committed to the use of serial compositional techniques such as dodecaphony, the twelve-tone technique.  This generally characterises his compositions from the mid-1950s, but he was never restricted by the musical forms he chose to use, and remained a highly original and inventive composer for the rest of his life. He died in New York in 1971.

 

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Stravinsky, as drawn by Picasso

 

Listen to Stravinsky’s Mass on our Spotify playlist

Read our CLoSer FAQs for more information on the concert series.

CLoSer: Spirit of the Voice
Wednesday 29 Feb, 7.30pm
Village Underground

 

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Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:38:00 -0800 Stravinsky's Mass http://cls.posterous.com/concert-focus-closer-stravinsky-mass http://cls.posterous.com/concert-focus-closer-stravinsky-mass

The second concert in our innovative, informal series, CLoSer, will focus on the human voice with a performance by CLS and the Holst Singers of Stravinsky's Mass.

Stravinsky began work on his Mass in 1944, completing the Kyrie and Gloria towards the end of that year. Pausing to work on other projects, he returned to the Mass in 1947, finally completing all the movements in 1948. He rarely wrote non-commissioned music, so is believed by his friend Robert Craft (the American conductor and writer) to have written his Mass out of ‘spiritual necessity.’

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Although he was devoted to the religious content, Stravinsky chose to write a Roman Catholic mass, despite being a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.  His reasons for doing this were practical ones: he was committed to creating a Mass that would be performed in liturgical circumstances, and, given that he disliked the sound of unaccompanied singing, couldn’t write for the Russian Orthodox Church, which forbids any music but the human voice and bells. The Roman Catholic Church permits instrumentation on religious occasions so provided the right vehicle for Stravinsky’s small wind ensemble and four-part choir.

Despite Stravinsky’s desire that the Mass be used liturgically, it has almost always been performed in concert since its first performance at La Scala in Milan in 1948. It remains, however, deeply committed to the affirmation of faith. Although he denied that he was influenced by any particular composer or composition, Stravinsky uses a chanting style of singing that is reminiscent of monastic chant, a style that, despite his tendency to put musical stresses on unstressed words, preserves the text of the mass and connects his work to older Christian musics.

His commitment to the spiritual content is, appropriately, particularly apparent in the Credo, about which Stravinsky is quoted by Robert Craft as saying “One composes a march to facilitate marching men, so with my Credo I hope to provide an aid to the text. The Credo is the longest movement. There is much to believe.” 

 Listen to Stravinsky’s Mass on our Spotify playlist

 

CLoSer: Spirit of the Voice
Wednesday 29 Feb, 7.30pm
Village Underground

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Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:43:00 -0800 CLoSer Interview: Holst Singers http://cls.posterous.com/closer-interview-holst-singers http://cls.posterous.com/closer-interview-holst-singers

We caught up with Will Davies from the Holst Singers, our Guest Artists at our next CLoSer concert, to find out more about this extraordinary choir.

Holst Singers, what are the origins of the choir and its name?
We were founded in 1978 under Hilary Davan Wetton, but for almost two decades have been conducted by our Musical Director Stephen Layton, who has shaped and nurtured the celebrated sound we make. I believe our name was actually taken from the Holst Room at St Paul’s Girls’ School where we originally rehearsed in the early days - so I guess we are named after the composer, but not directly!

How many singers in the choir? What’s the average profile of a Holstie? (if there is such a thing!)
We have a core of about 40 singers who are the ‘regulars’, who you’ll catch performing at most concerts. I’m not sure there is an ‘average’ Holstie! I suppose most of us are graduates with a chapel choir background, so Oxford and Cambridge feature fairly heavily in the choir’s make-up. Outside of that, we’re a very varied bunch, a whole range of ages and occupations. Without wanting to sound too cheesy, the thing that unites us all is music. I think we’re in a unique position as an institution– we’re one of the nation’s top-flight choirs, but we work entirely as a self-run amateur outfit, with no subscription fees or anything like that. It means that everyone involved is there to concentrate on the music-making; it works really well for us.

What is it like working with CLS Artistic Director Stephen Layton?
In short, truly inspiring. He’s one of the world’s greatest choral conductors, and it shows. He always seems to know exactly what he wants to achieve with the music, from the broad sweep of a piece to the subtle nuances. What’s great is that he knows how to get us to produce the performance he wants; he works us hard, but it’s always worth it for the end result.

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What’s the range of the choir’s repertoire? Do you enjoy performing newly-commissioned work, or prefer more established repertoire?
We love getting our teeth into a wide range of repertoire. I suppose we have a reputation for performing works in the very loose category of ‘unjustly neglected a cappella gems’ – works by Baltic composers like Tormis and Ešenvalds for instance, or the Russian Orthodox music on our Ikon recordings. We’re also actively involved in performing new commissions, from premiering Tavener’s Veil of the Temple to working with Imogen Heap on her soundtrack to The Seashell and the Clergyman.

Talk us through the pieces you’re performing for CLoSer.
We’re performing two pieces, Stravinsky’s Mass and Immortal Bach by Knut Nystedt. The Stravinsky is a great work. It’s quite severe, almost bleak at times, but beautiful with it. It’s scored for choir and a fairly small wind ensemble, and you get these wonderful moments of sparse, dissonant instrumental writing with the choir almost chanting the text, especially in the Credo. That’s probably the most challenging movement for us – not because it’s particularly difficult musically, but because he treats the text in a really counterintuitive way. Instead of setting it in the ‘usual’ way (accented and inflected as one might speak it, with expression) he produces a sort of muttering mantra; it’s this kind of ‘march of belief’, which is surprisingly tricky to get your head around at first.

Immortal Bach is really interesting – Nystedt takes the first two lines of the chorale Komm, süßer Tod and deconstructs them. You hear the unadulterated chorale first and then you hear it transformed, by dividing the choir into separate groups who sing each phrase of the chorale at different speeds, coming together at the cadence points before continuing onwards. It’s a bit tricky to explain without a choir on hand to demonstrate, but it’s very effective – the result is this fantastic smeary collage of Bach.

What do you hope the audience take away from your performance on 29 February?
I hope they get an impression of how the human voice can speak powerfully to you, in unexpected ways. I think the thing that connects the music we’ll be performing is that neither piece uses voices conventionally, to wring emotion from words or to make you say, “Oh, what a lovely tune”. The Nystedt is in a sense just the application of a simple mathematical rubric to a Bach chorale, and the Stravinsky is ascetic, austere music; and yet both produce this captivating atmosphere.

What would the Holst Singers desert island discs be and why?
Ah, now this is going be tricky. I’d have trouble enough doing my own, letting alone trying to speak for the whole choir – I’m inevitably going to get lynched when they see this! “How could you miss out Spem in alium?!” Ah well, here goes…
I think we need something early in there. Let’s have Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, because it’s pretty damn fit, especially the way the Kyrie kicks off; I could listen to that soaring-and-descending motif go round and round all day. It would be rude not to have anything Slavic on the island, let’s cram the Rachmaninov Vespers in the bag too. Last one… we need something English in there too. This’ll be a controversial one, but let’s go for the Vaughan Williams Shakespeare Songs. The middle movement is the sexiest thing ever. Wait. We get a full set of sheet music for these on the island too, right?!

CLoSer: Spirit of the Voice
Weds 29 February, 7.30pm
Village Underground, Shoreditch

Poulenc Suite Francaise
JS Bach French Suite
Poulenc Le Bal Masque
Nystedt Immortal Bach
Stravinsky Mass

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Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:15:00 -0800 Flashback: L’Chaim http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-lchaim http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-lchaim

In this edition of Flashback, we look to 1998 and the launch of our L’Chaim, Living Music project, which is still going strong and celebrating ‘living music’ today.

 

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"In tandem with the commencement of Music for Children at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Education and Community Programme also launched L’Chaim, Living Music. This is an informal concert project at the Otto Schiff Housing Association (OSHA) for Jewish refugees of Nazi persecution. Most OSHA residents are of German or Austrian origin, and their combined rich cultural heritage and love of music has been the defining factor in helping to shape the project.

 

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"Based at seven different homes and sites throughout North London, L’Chaim, Living Music will provide a three-year rotating programme of classical, Jewish, folk, religious and coffee house music... Whilst physical frailty may now prevent some of the residents attending concerts elsewhere in London, this has not hindered their support and enthusiasm for this project, and they have been integral to the planning process, programming and structure from the outset.

 

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"A long list of composers and musical interests was drawn up by the residents, many of whom are musicians themselves. After this initial meeting, it was clear that musical interests veered strongly towards the German classical tradition, but that many OSHA residents also enjoy folk, religious, light classical and jazz music. With these interests in mind, the programme for the year was drawn up...

"Soon after this, a trio of musicians were booked for the first three visits to OSHA (Erika Klemperer, violin, Danny Lyness, viola, Jo Cole, cello) and...they devised the first concert programme (including complete works by Beethoven, Kodaly and Schubert.) The first visits were a great success, reaching over 70 residents and staff and instant feedback from the residents was overwhelmingly positive."


Extract from CLScapades newsletter 1998

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Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:25:00 -0800 Conquering the Antarctic - The Place http://cls.posterous.com/94607423 http://cls.posterous.com/94607423

Ahead of our Conquering the Antarctic concert tour, starting next month, we're immersing ourselves in all things Antarctic. Here are some interesting facts about the most mysterious and fascinating of continents...

 

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  • The Antarctic is the world’s highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent (as well as the last to be discovered).
  • Ancient Greek geographers were the first to guess there was a large landmass around the South Pole. They named it Anti-Arkitkos (‘the opposite of the Arctic’).
  • Wind speeds of up to 351km (218 miles) per hour have been recorded.
  • In 1983, the coldest temperature ever was recorded at a freezing -89.2 degrees Celsius (-128.56 degrees Fahrenheit).
  • The distance between the UK and Antarctica is 11,000 miles (17702.784 km).
  • Ice in the middle of the continent can be up to 2500m (2 miles) thick.
  • Antarctica is more than 58 times bigger than Great Britain.
  • The pole moves with the ice at the rate of ten metres per year – each summer it has to be put back to its rightful geographical place.
  • Antarctic ice sheets store 70% of the world’s fresh water.
  • In Antarctica’s Dry Valleys, less than 6cm (2.4 in) of snow falls in a whole year.
  • Although there are no trees, more than 100 million birds nest and breed on the Antarctic.
  • Today, around 1,200 people spend the winter on Antarctica – about a third are scientists and the rest are support staff.
  • On average, ice sheets are nearly 2.5km (1.5 miles) thick – that’s the same as ten Canary Wharf towers on top of each other.
  • Thanks to high levels of oxygen in the water, sea spiders grow up to 30cm (12 in) across!

Conquering the Antarctic - the Scott Centenary Concert Tour

A celebration in music, words and images

Stephen Layton, conductor
Robert Murray, tenor
Hugh Bonneville, narrator

3-8 February and 3 March 2012

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Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:15:00 -0800 Conquering the Antarctic - In Pictures http://cls.posterous.com/conquering-the-antarctic-in-pictures-27980 http://cls.posterous.com/conquering-the-antarctic-in-pictures-27980

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Our Conquering the Antarctic concert tour, a celebration of the centenary of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole 1910-1912, in partnership with the Scott Polar Resarch Institute, Cambridge, begins this February. Alongside our performances of moving and evocative musical tributes by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecilia McDowall, we will be showing the stunning expedition photography of Herbert Ponting, which is remarkable for its quality and beauty.


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Ponting’s images portray the day-to-day life of the expedition, focusing on the camp from which the team made its exploratory treks. Through these pictures, we can witness the busy but methodical way the group went about conducting research in the frozen landscape, utilising cutting-edge scientific techniques and instruments. Though the expedition is now remembered for Scott’s doomed attempt to reach the South Pole, this selection of images goes some way towards conjuring up the team’s more contented and companionable times. You might have spotted some of the pictures on the BBC’s recent Frozen Planet series!

Images: SPRI, University of Cambridge

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Conquering the Antarctic
3-8 Feb & 3 March 2012
Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cheltenham, and London

In partnership with Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

 

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Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:57:00 -0800 Festive Playlist http://cls.posterous.com/festive-playlist http://cls.posterous.com/festive-playlist

With Christmas approaching, our thoughts have turned to festive music! We know how much you love our playlists, so we’ve put together a good mix of our favourite seasonal tunes from all across the genres. Guaranteed to put you in a festive mood!

Is there any essential listening we’ve missed?

Listen to the Spotify playlist here


Angels We Have Heard on High - traditional 

White Christmas - Bing Crosby 

In the Bleak Midwinter - Darke 

The Christmas Song - Nat King Cole

Away in a Manger - traditional 

Let it Snow! - Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne 

O Holy Night - Adam 

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas  - Bing Crosby 

A Hymn to the Virgin - Britten 

Once in Royal David’s City - traditional 

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Darlene Love 

The Holly and the Ivy - traditional 

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues 

Walking in the Air - Howard Blake 

Hanukkah, O Hanukkah - Barenaked Ladies

Coventry Carol - traditional

Baby it’s Cold Outside - Frank Loesser

Ceremony of Carols: This Little Babe - Britten

Christmas Time - The Darkness

Silent Night - traditional

Fantasia on Christmas Carols - Vaughan Williams

Ding Dong Merrily On High - Radcliffe Woodward

Only One More Sleep - The Muppets

 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM ALL AT CITY OF LONDON SINFONIA

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Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:21:51 -0800 Who was Captain Scott? http://cls.posterous.com/who-was-captain-scott http://cls.posterous.com/who-was-captain-scott

We asked our newest Marketing recruit, Alice, to help us discover who Captain Scott really was ahead of our Conquering the Antarctic concert tour in February.

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Now remembered as a ‘race to the Pole,’ the tale of Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic from 1910-1912 has acquired the dimensions of a myth. But we are able to discover a good deal about what really happened on the expedition from Scott’s diaries, which give a vivid and moving depiction of the challenges the hard-working team faced.

Who was this man, whose personal qualities were so central to the expedition, and whose diaries, discovered by a rescue mission three months after his death, continue to provide a moving and emotive demonstration of his resolve and dignity in such unthinkable circumstances? What drove him to undertake this monumental challenge?

Born in 1868, Robert Falcon Scott joined a Royal Navy training ship at the age of thirteen. From 1900 to 1904, he commanded a British trip to the Antarctic, and from 1907-1909, Scott’s erstwhile companion Shackleton led a further British Antarctic Expedition to the Antarctic, locating the South Pole high on the ice plateau. Scott planned to finish what Shackleton had begun, and a further privately-funded expedition was raised which led to the purchase of the expedition ship, the Terra Nova, for £12,500.

Although he declared that the "main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and secure for the British Empire the honour of that achievement," Scott also had geological, biological and meteorological goals. The British team faced competition from the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had abandoned earlier attempts to reach the North Pole in favour of being the first to get to the South. Despite this element of competition, Scott’s diaries reveal that he refused to abandon the pursuit of science, however difficult and unrelenting the freezing conditions.

When they reached the Pole in January 1912, the malnourished and frostbitten explorers found that the Norwegian team had got there first. Some believe that tragedy would have been prevented if the British team had ‘won’—they would have been in better spirits. As it was, they all met their deaths soon after. As Scott wrote in his journal, “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”


To read the full version of this blog post, visit our website
Image courtesy of SPRI, University of Cambridge


Conquering the Antarctic
2-8 Feb & 3 March 2012
Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cheltenham, London

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Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:40:52 -0800 The Big Give Christmas Challenge http://cls.posterous.com/the-big-give-christmas-challenge-13180 http://cls.posterous.com/the-big-give-christmas-challenge-13180

Earlier this month, pupils from three primary schools in Tower Hamlets took part in a very magical project with our musicians and workshop leader Claire Bloor. October and November were full of magic for the Education team with our Lullaby series followed by our sell-out Crash Bang Wallop! concert at Cadogan Hall and we were so pleased that alongside these projects, we were able to develop a bespoke project for 150 Year 1 and 2 pupils from across Tower Hamlets; the starting point of a new and exciting programme of work in the Borough.

In the spring we met with THAMES, the Tower Hamlets Arts and Music Education Service to explore possibilities of developing work together. THAMES works with schools across Tower Hamlets, providing instrumental music teachers and running ensembles but also have a very strong history of exciting, effective partnerships. They work with a wide range of professional partners and we are proud to be one of them!

The concert was wonderful, something the children would never have been able to experience without you.
Teacher, Thomas Buxton Primary School

Our first project in October saw a special schools performance of our Magic themed show which included arrangements of works such as Dukas Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute. Around this, we ran a series of workshops with four classes, introducing children to the repertoire and instruments of the Orchestra. Alongside workshop leader, Claire Bloor, the children also wrote their own lyrics to a song about a magical owl which was performed with the Orchestra at the concert. 

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Image: Paul Coghlin

This pilot project has exceeded our expectations and we now plan to visit eight more primary schools in Tower Hamlets, with a series of bespoke schools concerts and workshops, introducing a further 300 children and their teachers to the Orchestra.  In order to make this important work happen we are taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge (5-9 December), through which we need to raise £25,000 in order to enable this transformational work to happen. 

Visit our Big Give page to find out more and how to get involved.

Big Give Christmas Challenge
5 - 9 Dec 2011     

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Fri, 04 Nov 2011 04:32:38 -0700 Flashback - Music for Children 1998 http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-music-for-children-1998 http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-music-for-children-1998

For this installment of Flashback, we're looking back to the beginning of Music for Children, which began in 1998 as part of our Education and Community Programme. This project was launched at Great Ormond Street Hospital for sick children in September 1998 with three CLS musicians (Jo Cole 'cello; Duke Dobing flute; Nick Ward violin). An initial 'Pilot Day' enabled the musicians to familiarise themselves with the hospital, staff, patients and different wards.

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The CLS team then visited the Hospital School with creative work based on Italy, the in-school topic for the term. The Venice Carnival was re-created over two mornings of music-making workshops, as well as pizza-making and other fun activities. The afternoons were shared between visits to the Mildred Creek Psychiatric Unit and the Dialysis Ward, with several new pieces of music being created and performed.

Following these successful project days a three-year partnership with the Hospital, which is now in its thirteenth year! Nadezna Wilkins, the Hospital School's Music Co-ordinator, was extremely enthusiastic: "The musicians are extremely friendly with the staff and young people both in the school and on the wards. They display excellent skills when teaching children of all ages and abilities."

CLS are delighted to announce that we have recently received a generous grant from the City of London Corporation's City Bridge Trust for £85,700 over three years in order to expand our hospital work to Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals next year.

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:26:22 -0700 Flashback - First Prom 1973 http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-first-prom-1973 http://cls.posterous.com/flashback-first-prom-1973

For this instalment of Flashback, we’re heading back to our first ever BBC Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday 1 August 1973, when CLS was still known as the Richard Hickox Orchestra. The Orchestra performed Handel’s Messiah with the Richard Hickox Singers (also founded in 1971) alongside a host of incredibly talented soloists, many of whom were budding young stars and have since gone on to great things!

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Back then we were joined by Stephen Cleobury on the organ, now better known for being Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral and Director of Music of the world-renowned Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. Alastair Ross who is still a member of CLS, performed as a soloist on the harpsichord too.

Our vocal soloists on the night included the late Philip Langridge, a tenor who became famous for performing the works of Benjamin Britten and was regarded as the true successor of Peter Pears, baritone Raimund Herincx who has since appeared with the Welsh National Opera and at the Royal Opera House, and James Bowman who has become arguably the most acclaimed countertenor of his generation.

This year we’re returning to the Proms on Sunday 21 August to perform a new work by Colin Matthews, No Man’s Land, which was commissioned by the late Richard Hickox, alongside Britten’s Variations on a theme of Bridge, and Mozart’s Requiem, recently voted the Nation’s Favourite Mozart piece by BBC Radio 3 listeners.

For a flavour of our upcoming Prom, listen to our Spotify playlist.

 

Sunday 21 August
Royal Albert Hall
Tickets: £7.50 - £36

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Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:12:00 -0700 Concert Focus – Geoffrey Burgon http://cls.posterous.com/concert-focus-geoffrey-burgon-63070 http://cls.posterous.com/concert-focus-geoffrey-burgon-63070

On 21 July we’re celebrating the life and work of the late Geoffrey Burgon with performances of a selection of his film and television music, as well as two of his concertos. Burgon is famous for the accessibility of his music, rebelling against avant-garde orthodoxies which controlled commissions and performance at the beginning of his career. He produced over 200 compositions during his lifetime, and is considered as one of the gems of English contemporary music.

 

Born in 1941 Burgon went to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama originally to train as a jazz trumpeter. However, composition took over as his major interest and he found success writing ballet scores for Ballet Rambert and London Contemporary Dance Theatre. It was his incredibly popular Requiem that established Burgon as a serious composer, and his reputation was sealed. Much of his fame developed from his wonderful scores for film and television, including  Brideshead Revisited in 1981, which led to many offers from Hollywood. He is also known for his music for Doctor Who in the 1970s, Bleak House (1985), the Chronicles of Narnia (1988-90), Robin Hood (1991), and The Forsyte Saga (2002-03).

 

Brideshead_revisited_web

 

It would be wrong to pigeon hole Burgon in the film/television composer bracket. His Viola Concerto, know as Ghosts of the Dance was commissioned by concert soloist Philip Dukes, and was influenced by 1930s American dance music and the effects of the Depression. In his Cello Concerto, a piece which explores the relationship between soloist and orchestra in a novel way, Burgon began to see the soloist as a figure in Film Noir, pursued by dark forces but prevailing and eventually escaping to a dreamlike ‘Hollywood Heaven’ world.

 

For a flavour of some of the music we’ll be performing at the concert listen to our Spotify playlist.


Thursday 21 July, 7.30pm

St John’s, Smith Square

Tickets: £34.50, £28, £18

 

Viola Concerto
Cello Concerto
Extracts from TV and Film scores

 

The event will be presented by Monty Python’s Terry Jones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fri, 08 Jul 2011 03:43:26 -0700 Out of Office: Ruth http://cls.posterous.com/out-of-office-ruth http://cls.posterous.com/out-of-office-ruth

It feels strange to be writing a blog post called Out of Office, when my internship at CLS, which began in June, is the only time I have ever worked in one! For eight months of the year, I pretend to be vastly intellectual at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (nicknamed the Paul McCartney Fame School), studying for a degree in arts management. While there, my time is usually divided between lectures (on subjects ranging from the theatrical management philosophies of David Garrick to Twitter tips), getting involved in Liverpool’s thriving arts scene and trying to work out who will be the next Beatles so that for the rest of my life I can exaggerate about how close we all were at uni!

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Last weekend, I returned to ‘the north’ to move, with three course-mates, out from the constrictions of student halls and into a house, where we all agreed that true student liberation could finally begin. With the help of an old (and rather cliché) shopping trolley we found in our halls, no doubt an abandoned trophy brought back by some revellers a few nights before, we set about moving the vast quantities of items that had suddenly accumulated in our tiny student rooms. The fact that the new house was literally across the street seemed irrelevant as we battled with oddly shaped bags, printers and the sideways drift of the trolley due to a particularly dodgy wheel. By the end of a number of sweaty hours, all I wanted was to collapse on my new bed and never move again.

I am hoping that my return to Liverpool in September will bring with it some more of the exciting cultural experiences I was fortunate enough to be involved with throughout my first year at university. As a meek-faced fresher, I expected the city to be continuously living in the shadow of the ‘fab four’ with John Lennon shrines on every other street corner and endless repeats of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ on local radio. However the advancement, innovation and sheer enormity of the arts scene in Liverpool is one to be marveled at and, if you get the chance, thoroughly participated in. I was lucky enough to witness a free concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in my first week, which set the bar for everything that was to come. From fashion shows in night clubs, films in bombed-out churches and Kim Cattrall in Shakespeare, Liverpool really does have it all (so much so that my friends from home are beginning to suspect that I am getting paid to advertise the city to them). All this being said, I am so excited to be working ‘in the big smoke’ with CLS. I know my work in the office will help me so much when I’m out again.  

Ruth Meekings
Marketing Intern

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