CLScapades http://cls.posterous.com City of London Sinfonia blog posterous.com Thu, 27 Sep 2012 02:53:00 -0700 CLoSer Returns http://cls.posterous.com/closer-return http://cls.posterous.com/closer-return

We asked our outgoing Marketing Intern Anna, to give us her review of the first CLoSer of series two

Last week City of London Sinfonia returned to Village Underground, the unique home of the informal CLoSer concert series, for a second year.

September_19_2012_cls_020
At a glance the basement venue is an odd choice for a classical music concert, but when colourful cushions, vibrant musicians and an excited audience are added, the venue comes alive! Its prime location in the up and coming Shoreditch area is great for attracting creative locals, but is also an appealing spot to visit for those who live further afield. Our CLoSer audiences consist of a wide range of people, young and old, with mixed levels of musical knowledge and varied experiences of classical music, but who all wish to share their love of music in the informal and relaxed environment that CLoSer provides.

 The programme for this first concert had a distinctly American feel to it and Michael Collins, City of London Sinfonia’s Principal Conductor, delved straight into the Stravinsky Concerto in D with a high level of excited energy. The City of London Sinfonia strings played with a commitment to this energetic and rhythmic concerto, evidenced by the sight of a loose bow hair flying around in the violins. The second movement was beautifully melodic and reminiscent of a romantic ballet, rather than the sacrificial dance that Stravinsky is known for. This came to an abrupt end in the third movement which presented a pulsating rhythm and a mischievous melody in the violins, creating a tense mood and putting me on the edge of my cushion!

September_19_2012_cls_057

We then welcomed Guest Artists the Katona Twins to the stage to perform Piazzolla’s Hommage à Liège. The Hungarian guitar duo were joined by a dissonant string accompaniment which filled the brick underground with a wonderful resonant sound. The music was intricate and detailed and the pair played with style and apparent ease. At one point the cellos, double bass and guitar duo used their instruments as drums to create a powerful rhythm which built up to an explosive finale which caused excitement to ripple through the room.

September_19_2012_cls_035

The Twins took centre stage for two further pieces from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo suite - The Magic Circle and Ritual Fire Dance . These were full of emotion and with the help of the relaxed atmosphere and the close proximity to the guitar duo, the audience were able to connect to the musicians from their own cushioned corner. In quieter moments the music was played with grace and intimacy, and the louder moments were confident and passionate.

As an encore, the twins played Piazzolla’s Autumn in Buenos Aires, joined by a tango dancing couple who highlighted the sensual and smooth character of De Falla’s music with their movement.

September_19_2012_cls_051

Michael Collins returned for the final piece of the night, to much delight of the audience. The opening of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto was magical, calming and soothing. Michael did a sterling job as both clarinettist and conductor, seamlessly transforming from one role to the other throughout. As always, his playing was flawless and animated and the string players were exceptionally engaging.

The post-concert atmosphere was fantastic with many audience members staying to chat with the musicians, bursting with their thoughts on the evening. The only disappointment is that we’ll have to wait until February for the next one!

Tickets are now on sale for the next two CLoSer concerts on Wednesday 13 February and Wednesday 10 April 2013.

Tickets: £15 (includes one free drink)

CLS FIVER (16-25 year olds): £5 (pre-register with marketing@cls.co.uk)

Box Office: 020 7377 1362/spitalfieldsmusic.org

 

Images: James Berry

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/2053654/cls.logo.high_copy.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4TkaSSgy6Gxb City of London Sinfonia CLS City of London Sinfonia
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.

 

Stravinsky_picasso
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

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/2053654/cls.logo.high_copy.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4TkaSSgy6Gxb City of London Sinfonia CLS City of London Sinfonia
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.’

170px-igor_stravinsky_essays

 

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

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/2053654/cls.logo.high_copy.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4TkaSSgy6Gxb City of London Sinfonia CLS City of London Sinfonia
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.

The_holst_singers_web

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

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/2053654/cls.logo.high_copy.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4TkaSSgy6Gxb City of London Sinfonia CLS City of London Sinfonia