Part of the fun of exploring new repertoire is coming up with creative ideas for programming it; and for the Minervan Miniatures recital series next year, exploring forgotten or neglected piano repertoire by women composers, here’s a foretaste of how that might work – The Four Seasons by Women Composers, a suite of pieces reflecting the changing seasons, all written by women.
Not your usual Vivaldi!
The suite I’ve put together is of music by Marguerite Balutet, Mary Earl, Carrie Williams Krogmann, Tatiana Stankovych and Nannie Louise Wright, ranging from the opening Valzer di Primavera through to Autumn: A Tone Poem and closing with Winter and A Skating Carnival.
See more of the repertoire in the series on our YouTube playlist here.
The second volume in the Magnificat series by Andrew Nethsingha and The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge takes a keen look at settings of the Evening Canticles across the years, from 1932 to 2019 from stalwart composers of the canon in Sumsion and Howells to perhaps lesser-known figures including Sydney Watson (who conducted the first performance of Walton’s epic The Twelve) and Giles Swayne, as well as contemporary titans Arvo Pärt and Julian Anderson.
In this first episode, Hugh reflects on the challenges of recording the natural world; the concept of authenticity and being true to the practice of capturing the environment in sound, in single, unedited takes; and similarities between listening to soundscapes and to music, and the idea of defeating time.
Filmed during lockdown, the unfolding series brings together image and music in a meditative presentation of both the materials and the methods involved in research, uncovering the hidden beauty in the most mundane of objects in the research laboratory and transforming the process of investigation into an artistic experience, filtered through piano music by Philip Glass, Debussy, John Cage and Tarik O’Regan.
Colyer-Fergusson Hall becomes an immersive platform for highlighting processes operating in both science and music – viral infection and the process of mutation linked to compositional processes in music, together taking the viewer on an odyssey through sub-molecular events at the cellular level.
This week, our Scholars’ Spotlight series of short filmed performances presents second-year Music Performance Scholar reading Comparative Literature, Joanna Adaran, singing the classic At Last.