Congratulations to all the members of the University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra on Saturday’s electrifying return to Canterbury Cathedral. For the first time since 2019, the annual Colyer-Fergusson concert resounded in the Cathedral Nave, and we were delighted to welcome back several alumni to take part.
Thank you also to our fantastic soloists: soprano Rachel Nicholls, mezzo Emma Stannard, and two Kent alumni, tenor Andrew Macnair and bass-baritone Piran Legg.
It’s never easy to take part in an instrumental masterclass; it’s like having a very public lesson, with someone you’ve only just met, who’s asking you to produce instant results in the way you play.
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So it’s many congratulations to flautists Rena Ward, Yuyu Hosokawa and Kiran Dehal, and pianists Will Morgan and Hana Fairuzamira, on this afternoon’s masterclass with members of London Conchord Ensemble, working on the three movements of the Poulenc Flute Sonata. The session followed on from the ensemble’s Lunchtime Concert, and was a great opportunity for some of this year’s Music Performance Scholars and Music Award Holders to work on Poulenc’s challenging work.
The lunchtime concert on Weds 16th March is the second in our Scholar’s Spotlight series, and features international student and Hindustani singer, Ridima Sur.
As well as welcoming a live audience, the event will be livestreamed and may be watched for free on our YT channel here:
In her third year reading Astrophysics, Ridima is joined by sitarist and composer Jonathan Mayer, with tabla-player Denis Kucherov. The livestream opens at 1pm, and the concert begins at 1.10pm.
The University of Kent Chorus comprises students, staff, alumni and members of the local community amongst its ranks, meeting every Monday night to rehearse towards its termly concerts. A great example of communal music-making, bringing people together in a shared creative endeavour, both from across the University community – librarians, staff in Registry, heads of department, lecturers, members of the University chaplaincy – as well as former members of staff, and people from across the region, working collectively towards a common outcome.
This term, that concert takes place in the Nave of Canterbury Cathedral – in fact, it’s happening in just five days’ time… – and here is the choir in action, rehearsing at the weekend in Haydn’s Nelson Mass with the Symphony Orchestra.
It’s a busy time for the Music department, and for the Symphony Orchestra in particular; not only is the annual Colyer-Fergusson Cathedral concert looming, for which the Orchestra is preparing works by Haydn and Mendelssohn – but the musicians are also performing as part of next month’s Composer in Focus event featuring John Woolrich.
Pictured here at a recent weekend rehearsal are the musicians working on Woolrich’s Gesänge der Frühe, which the Orchestra will perform as part of the event on 2nd April, alongside the String Sinfonia and several Music Scholarship pianists, exploring John Woolrich’s music and approaches to composition.
Images of empty Italian piazzi find echo in music for string orchestra, including John Woolrich’s Ulysses Wakes, as the #EarBox series bringing music and images together returns to Studio 3 Gallery with the University String Sinfonia on Weds 23 March at 1.10pm.
Charlotte CaneJohn Woolrich: image by Chesney Browne
Woolrich’s piece is a transcription of Ulysses’ first aria in Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, first performed in 1640. Washed up on the coast of Ithaca, Ulysses wakes on the shores and asks ‘Am I sleeping or awake? / And what country surrounds me?’ as he fails at first to recognise his home. In Woolrich’s reimagining, Ulysses’ questioning aria is sung not by a voice, but by the darker-hued tones of a solo viola, played here by Music Performance Scholar, Kira Hilton.
The University String Sinfonia
The programme will also include Purcell’s Chacony and Vaughan Williams’ reflective Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. as well as Vivaldi’s vivacious ‘Spring’ from The Four Seasons.
The concert is set against the backdrop of the gallery’s current exhibition Le Piazze [In]visibili – Invisible Squares, which was created during the early days of lockdown in Italy in 2020, and reflects the desolate emptiness of town squares which traditionally throng with residents and tourists, but which suddenly became empty like so many social spaces around the entire world.
Timpani players can have a fairly perfunctory role to play in music from the Classical era, largely (though not always) confined to articulating cadential moments in a symphony, or underlining a moment punctuated by the brass. (I’m aware this isn’t always the case, before people start writing in about later works such as Beethoven 9 and Berlioz to start with; and then there’s Bartok in the twentieth century…!). Timpani at the time were limited in pitch to a fourth or a fifth apart, tuned (until late in the nineteenth century) by a somewhat laborious method of ‘taps’ located around the head, which players had to turn by hand until the tension at the required pitch was uniform across the whole skin of the instrument.
Portrait of Mendelssohn Eduard Magnus (1846)
And then there’s Mendelssohn’s first symphony, and in particular, the third movement. In the Scherzo, Mendelssohn uses the timpani in an understated dialogue with the strings (although ‘nags the strings’ might be a more apt description), gently cajoling them out of the central Trio section and encouraging them back to the reprise of the Minuet.
It’s a striking moment; there’s not much happening melodically, sustained chords high in the violins over gently undulating legato phrases rising and falling the lower strings; it’s as though the timpanist thinks ‘right, I’ve had enough of this: time to get back to the start of the movement, folks!’ and so insistently begins to play in a way that provokes a response from the strings, forcing them out of their lull and back to the urgent, insistent character of the opening. (The timpani part is marked ‘solo’ at this point, so it’s definitely intentional). It’s ever so slightly menacing, at one point prodding the strings into an uncomfortable, diminished chord – and played with hard mallets rather than soft ones, it gives a wonderfully crisp, penetrating edge to the sound. It’s only two notes, but boy, do they work…
Hear that moment for yourself 18 1/2 minutes into the performance given here by Natalie Stutzman and the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo – and then come and hear it live with us in Canterbury Cathedral on Saturday 12 March…
I heard a piece of music on BBC Radio 3 Breakfast this morning and instantly burst into tears. (And no, I’m not going to tell you what it was.)* It was one of those unexpected moments when music reaches out and gets under your skin, and from nowhere there’s an immediate emotional response for which you’re wholly unprepared. It’s what music does best, one of its greatest powers: to move you when you least expect it.
Image: Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash
It made me reflect on why the music had affected me so much; I’d heard other pieces throughout the morning, but nothing had struck me quite so forcefully until that moment. The piece was a wonderfully intimate song – just voice and piano – small-scale, but operating with an emotional weight far greater than chamber music from two performers might suggest. And I realised it was because, at this moment, I have two huge pieces whirling around in my head – Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Fauré’s Requiem – that we’re preparing for forthcoming concerts here in the Music department, and which I’m in the midst of rehearsing.
Image: Varun Gaba / Unsplash
The way my brain operates is that, as we gradually draw closer to a performance (the Haydn is in three weeks’ time), it starts to bring the repertoire to the surface and keep it moving through my inner ear, often to the point where the relevant pieces are all I can think about during the whole day. It’s a way, I suppose, of my working through to check that I really do know them before stepping out to conduct them; but it’s also a way of really ensuring I’ve understood the emotional landscape of the music, expressed in its harmonic language. Have I really grasped the import of that diminished chord ? Why is the movement in the cellos and basses at that bar so important ? What’s the effect of that interrupted cadence there ? Why are the second violins playing that particular note when the firsts are playing THAT one ? What does it all mean ?
I think it was Britten who observed that musicians have a thinner layer of skin, so that they can experience the emotion of music more readily (or something like that). For me, this is definitely the case the nearer I get to a performance, as the music continues to sound throughout my imagination each day as the concert draws closer. If the music is to have any chance of operating successfully, then you have to have fully explored its emotional ebb and flow throughout the rehearsal process; you have to have opened yourself up to the harmonic implications in the score, to the emotional terrain it is exploring, in order to bring that out during rehearsals. The musicians have to know why that note, that chord, even that beat’s rest, is important; to understand where their contribution fits into the larger whole, and what effect that should have on the listener. And you can only do that if you’ve made yourself readily accessible to the music’s demands, in order to share them with the musicians and then (hopefully) to the listener. It’s about creating space for emotional honesty – for you as the conductor, for the performers, and for the audience – for which the music is asking; making yourself emotionally susceptible, able to be alive to all the harmonic / emotional nuance in the music to be able to draw it from the performers.
Image: David Clode / Unsplash
So it seems that those unexpected tears provoked by the piece on the radio came because of the emotional terrain to which I’m opening my ears at the moment ahead of performing the Haydn and the Fauré – two contrasting pieces rich in emotional expression, particularly the latter – and that means I’m obviously in a heightened state of susceptibility towards other music at this point too. It will become increasingly heightened the nearer we get to the concert (aided in no small way, I am sure, by pre-concert nerves…), but it should hopefully mean that, when we come to the performance, we will be taking the listener through the emotional odyssey the composer has asked us to realise in the white-heat of performance.
I’ll just have to be wary of listening to the radio until then…
* (If you’ve read thus far, then perhaps you deserve to know; it was Mel Tormé and George Shearing in a live performance of It Might As Well Be Spring, alright ?! Thanks, Petroc Trelawny…!)
Because it does. Doesn't it ? Blogging about extra-curricular musical life at the University of Kent.
Thank you also to our fantastic soloists: soprano Rachel Nicholls, mezzo Emma Stannard, and two Kent alumni, tenor Andrew Macnair and bass-baritone Piran Legg.
Images © Chris Wenham / University of Kent
