VIJAY IYER - Wigmore Hall

VIJAY IYERCOMPOSER IN RESIDENCE 2019/20ON MUSICALITY

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MEMORIES OF WIGMORE WITH JULIA BOYDINTRODUCING THE KALEIDOSCOPE CHAMBER COLLECTIVEMUSICAL CONVERSATIONS WITH WIGMORE HALL LEARNINGFROM DUBLIN AND EDINBURGH TO LONDON WITH ENSEMBLE MARSYAS

THANK YOU FOR HELPING US RAISE OVER £100,000!

Summer is well and truly behind us and our 2019/20 Season is in full flow. In this issue, our Trustee and supporter Julia Boyd reflects on what the Hall has come to mean to her over the many years she and her late husband John started coming here. Music has meant so much to them both, and walking into the auditorium has been like a balm, a moment in time to be inspired and transported. Julia echoes the numerous conversations which John Gilhooly and I have had with many of you over the last few months. Your recollections are so eloquent and compelling and we continue to be inspired and motivated by your passion for this place. Your annual gifts to our programme through membership or your donations to our Audience Fund, your support for our Endowment Fund (see page 8)

We are hugely grateful for the response to our Audience Fund appeal this year – thanks to 437 generous audience members we were able to raise £91,533.45. Including the additional boost we will receive via Gift Aid, this means you have helped us raise over £106,000 to support this current season, and all the wonderful things in it! Gifts ranged from £5 to £3,000, and cumulatively will play an important role in making our extensive programme of concerts and events this year possible. Whether this be underpinning a particularly ambitious artistic series, enabling us to present a young or emerging artist, or simply contributing to the everyday maintenance and upkeep necessary to keep this building in good working order, the Audience Fund is an essential part of Wigmore Hall’s annual functioning. Thank you to all those who have contributed – we continue to be very grateful for your generosity.

If you would still like to support this year’s Audience Fund appeal, you can do so via wigmore-hall.org.uk/SA1920

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and your thoughtfulness in including Wigmore Hall as a beneficiary in your Will make a tangible impact on Wigmore Hall. Fundraising remains a tough game but you are helping us ensure Wigmore Hall’s wellbeing now and into the future.

Musical conversations are at the heart of our Learning festival in February next year and it is exhilarating to hear from two young voices in classical music, Freya Waley-Cohen and Claire Roberts, in this issue. Freya is our Associate Composer and is mentoring Claire throughout this season.

Vijay Iyer, our Composer in Residence, reflects on musicality and on making classical music more accessible to a broader audience. And if you missed Jonathan Biss’ talk after his first recital of the season, we have included some of his interview here, as well as a fascinating timeline to give our readers an insight into the history of Beethoven in performance at the Hall as early as its inaugural concert in 1901.

Connecting people with people and with music: this is an everyday reality at Wigmore Hall. Conversations bring us together and I am hoping to have many more with Friends and supporters. Engagement with our audience is stimulating and uplifting; without your commitment to the Hall we simply could not present the breadth and quality of performance or remain as this country’s pre-eminent centre for chamber music and song. Our Friends and donors make all the difference. If you would like to discuss a gift, or share a special recollection, please get in touch with me [email protected] or call 020 7258 8220. It is always good to hear from you!

Marie-Hélène Osterweil Director of Development

COVER Vijay Iyer © Barbara Rigon

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On Thursday 3 October, Wigmore Hall hosted a retirement party for outgoing Senior House Manager, David King. Many of you who have been to the Hall over the last 34 years will have met David, brightly welcoming everyone and managing the stage in his inimitable style. We are sad to see him retire from the Wigmore family, and incredibly grateful for his many years of dedicated service. Friends, family and artists from many parts of David’s life were able to join the staff of Wigmore Hall in a toast in October.

Joined in his celebration by The English Concert, under the direction of Trevor Pinnock, the landmark 40th birthday concert was followed by a presentation from Wigmore Hall’s Director, John Gilhooly. John awarded Davies with the Wigmore Medal. This award was inaugurated in 2007 and recognises major international artists and significant figures in the classical music industry who have a strong association

IESTYN DAVIES’ BIRTHDAY HONOUR

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WIGMORE HALL NEWS

with the Hall; Davies has been singing at Wigmore Hall for 13 years.

A delighted Iestyn Davies comments: ‘I’m honoured to join a very distinguished group of medal recipients and even more so to have this recognition on my 40th birthday. Wigmore Hall and John Gilhooly have always been central to my development as an artist and were integral in giving me such fantastic opportunities at the start of my career. I am flattered to have ever received that support. Though I am of course just a small dot in the history of Wigmore Hall, it means an enormous amount to me personally to be recognised in this way.’

Davies’ residency continues on 22 March 2020, where he and lutenist Thomas Dunford present the first UK performance of their new programme England’s Orpheus.

DAVID KING RETIRES FROM WIGMORE HALL AFTER 34 YEARS

THOMAS LARCHER RECEIVES GRAND AUSTRIAN STATE PRIZEComposer Thomas Larcher has been awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize, the highest honour his home country presents in recognition of artistic achievement. The Austrian Cultural Minister, Alexander Schallenberg, has described Larcher as ‘a frontier crosser of music that has developed a specific timbre of its own’. We look forward to welcoming Thomas Larcher as Composer in Residence in the 2020/21 Season.

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In 2019/20, Wigmore Hall is pleased to have the eminent countertenor Iestyn Davies in residency. His opening concert took place on 16 September, his 40th birthday, and Wigmore Hall had a special gift for the singer.

David King

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Julia Boyd, Wigmore Hall Trustee, member of our Bechstein Society, and long time audience member, asks, ‘Why does Wigmore Hall mean so much to us? After all, London is hardly short of wonderful spaces for music so what is it that makes this particular hall so remarkable?’

WIGMORE HALL MEMORIES


First and foremost it has to be the sheer quality of the music. Then there is the infinite and ever-expanding variety, the zest in performance, the imaginative programming, not to mention the charm of the staff. And all this delivered day after day, night after night, year after year. But each time you walk into Wigmore (in my case at least three or four times a week) to be enveloped in its familiar magic, you are never allowed to become complacent or to sink into a comfort zone.

Exciting challenges always lie ahead, whether in experiencing a controversial interpretation, unfamiliar repertoire or a dazzling new talent. Indeed, for those of us no longer able to cross deserts or sail oceans, there is no shortage of adventures at 36 Wigmore Street. Vijay Iyer? Sir George Benjamin? Freya Waley-Cohen? Perhaps this tension between familiarity and the unexpected is one reason why Wigmore Hall retains such a very special place in our hearts and minds.

But there are plenty more. How can we forget the first time we heard Sir András Schiff play the Bach 48, or Mark Padmore’s Winterreise; or that moment in a Brigitte Fassbaender masterclass when the young singer suddenly ‘gets it’ and is transformed before our eyes? Then there is the thrill of hearing – at one end of the spectrum – a new quartet bursting with talent and youthful vitality, and at the other the profundity and experience of, say, the Beaux Arts Trio whose pianist Menahem Pressler is 95. In the Hall, age dissolves. All are equal in the pursuit and achievement of excellence.

If the chief laurels go, of course, to the performers and staff, the punters also deserve an accolade. Where could you ever find a friendlier, more perceptive and committed audience? I have often been to Wigmore Hall on my own but cannot remember when I didn’t end up in animated conversation with some total stranger. This is a group that not only wants but needs to share its joy in music. And where, when coping with life’s slings and arrows, would you rather go to find solace than this Hall? Equally, when news of some appalling atrocity becomes too unbearable, is there anywhere better than our beloved Wigmore to remind us of our humanity?

Should anyone dare to accuse the Hall of that much over-used word ‘elitism’, I would urge them to attend a ‘Singing with Friends’ concert where the performing choir is composed of people living with dementia. They will never forget it. Equally the children’s concerts, the work in schools and care homes and the events devised for toddlers will banish any suspicion that Wigmore Hall does not serve the widest possible community.

This is all much too valuable to squander because we have taken Wigmore’s gold standard for granted and been too careless of its future. So, let those of us who love this unique institution preserve our own matchless memories by doing everything in our power to safeguard the Hall, and all it stands for, for future generations.

MAIN IMAGE Wigmore Hall auditorium

RIGHT Julia Boyd

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As well as a Wigmore Hall supporter, Julia Boyd is a distinguished writer and author of Travellers in the Third Reich (2017)


You have performed at Wigmore Hall many times now. What do you think of it as a performance space – its acoustic, ambience, history?I do adore the sound in the space. It is one of the world’s ideal spaces for chamber music, though perhaps more challenging for anything involving drums or amplification; regardless, we had some very special experiences there during my series in 2017. I will say that when I see the range of photos of mostly European classical performers backstage, I invariably feel like an interloper of some kind. I’m delighted that through this series my colleagues and I get to be written into the Hall’s history.

Do you think it gives a positive message to have somebody slightly outside the classical world performing in what is narrowly perceived as an ultra-traditional venue?I can’t speak to that. To me the issue is less about image and more about access. To that end I really appreciate that my concert with Mike Ladd offered free tickets for youth. I hope Wigmore often does that sort of thing!

A Q&A WITH

VIJAY IYERWIGMORE HALL’S COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE 2019/20

Describe your work with young composers and what your work at Harvard University entails.I was brought to Harvard nearly six years ago at a moment when the university and its then-president Drew Faust were looking to affirm the role of the arts at the centre of the campus experience. I was given a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts. I am now affiliated with both the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. My arrival sort of broke the ice, and I helped them attract a few newer faculty members, including Yosvany Terry, Esperanza Spalding, Teju Cole — some of my fellow artists of today. Together and separately we’ve created roles for ourselves that combine Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry. To solidify this, I christened a PhD program with that exact title, or CPCI for short. We are small in number, but as public artists our work and that of our protégés radiates outward to a public and has an immeasurable impact that is quite distinct from the majority of academic research, for example. That’s the main idea. I see it as a natural extension of the work I do as an artist in the world.

‘It’s a special privilege to bring together multiple streams of activity under one banner, in one place.’


Vijay Iyer, Wigmore Hall’s Composer in Residence 2019/20

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A Q&A WITH

VIJAY IYERWIGMORE HALL’S COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE 2019/20

What are the highlights of your residency this year for you?The entire residency is a life highlight for me. It’s a special privilege to bring together multiple streams of activity under one banner, in one place. My usual experience is that these different practices tend to circulate in different networks and different economies: speculative music making originating in the African diaspora (as in my duo with Craig Taborn), global post-colonial creative music influenced by those same practices (as with Ritual Ensemble), multidisciplinary performance combining music with poetry or other performing arts (as in my collaborations with Mike Ladd), and so-called classical/‘new music’/contemporary composition (as in the composer portrait concert with Aurora Orchestra). The opportunity to gather it all together under one rubric enables us to imagine beyond the genre tags invented by record companies in the previous century, and instead to experience a more inclusive listening at all levels. I hope we can all hear each other a little better because of it.

Briefly describe why the residency is titled ‘Musicality’.This term usually refers to a special, elusive quality we hear that captures, holds, or even guides us. We will say, for example, that a certain performer’s rendition of the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 was (or wasn’t!) musical. Lately I’ve tried to open the word up as a critical concept — that is, to reveal musicality’s inherent instabilities and ruptures, to try to understand the kind of work that a word like that does — but also to embrace, as we all do as music-makers and as listeners in the 21st century, that humankind can accommodate many musicalities. There are many ways that an experience can call to us or resonate with us, and therefore many ways that an experience can become musical. To me the concept helps us avoid generalizations about ‘music’ or some ‘style’ of music, and instead focus on specific musical moments that might actually matter to someone.


WIGMORE HALL’S ENDOWMENT FUND

Our Endowment is now over five years old and continues to grow steadily, giving the Hall more financial stability moving forward. The principle benefit has been the ability for us to plan ahead to secure artists for ambitious and insightful projects which previously were not affordable. Our artist residencies as well as focussed series around repertoire are now key elements in each season: these help us strengthen and broaden our relationships with artists and attract new audiences, too.

Wigmore Hall's Endowment Fund was initially boosted by Arts Council England’s match funding challenge and we are now aiming to raise £25 million by 2028 to grow and strengthen the Fund going forward. Wigmore Hall’s Endowment is managed by Partners Capital, who specialise in managing endowments for major institutions and foundations. They work closely with Wigmore Hall’s Investment Committee and are ultimately accountable to Wigmore Hall’s Trustees.

In 2018/19, the Endowment Fund supported:RESIDENCY Pekka Kuusisto presented a three-concert residency, featuring music by composers including Jörg Widmann, Perttu Haapanen and Steve Reich alongside that of Bach, Bartók and Paganini. Moving away from the traditional concert format, each of Kuusisto’s concerts consisted of musical performances alongside a series of talks and visuals exploring the human body and the links between biology and music. These multi-modal concerts were a new thing for the Hall and many of our audience members. They provided us with a key opportunity to reach and engage new demographics, which can be seen from the fact that nearly 40% of the audience present at Kuusisto’s concerts were under 35.

RUSSIAN SONG SERIES Iain Burnside curated a four-concert long Russian Song Series at Wigmore Hall, performing a wide variety of works by composers ranging from Tchaikovsky to Glazunov. While some of the singers featured in the series, all of whom are fluent Russian speakers, had already performed at the Hall – such as Justina Gringytė – many like Sofia Fomina or Sofia Mchedlishvili had not. Through this series we were able to forge strong relationships with these young artists, ensuring that they return to the Hall for many years to come.

SCHUMANN SERIES The Endowment Fund also supported a wide-ranging celebration of the music of Robert Schumann across the season. This celebration focussed on Schumann’s chamber music and lieder as the Elias String Quartet performed his three quartets, and Malcolm Martineau explored his lieder in collaboration with Florian Boesch, Anne Schwanewilms, Robin Tritschler and Dame Sarah Connolly. These concerts were a compelling celebration of Schumann’s music, as some of the leading artists of our time showed the continuing power of his music to engage and captivate audiences.

In 2019/20, the Endowment Fund is supporting:■ A season-long exploration of Britten’s chamber music and songs,

commemorating Britten’s long affiliation with Wigmore Hall;■ A celebration of Brahms’ music, with several Wigmore Hall

regulars showcasing this wonderful repertoire and providing musical context for our Beethoven Festival;

■ A focus on Weinberg – Wigmore Hall will mark Weinberg’s centenary with a retrospective of the composer’s chamber music featuring Quatuor Danel and Linus Roth.

Once again, the Endowment Fund will be sustaining a diverse series of projects this season, both supporting more traditional concerts, through the Britten and Brahms series, alongside the important re-evaluation of lesser-known repertoire through the celebration of Weinberg’s chamber music.

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TOP LEFT Pekka Kuusisto TOP RIGHT Sofia Mchedlishvili BELOW Quatuor Danel

Wigmore Hall’s Endowment Fund was launched in 2012, thanks to the Arts Council Catalyst scheme to help organisations diversify their sources of income and invest in their long-term future. The Fund gives our audience and supporters a way of providing for many years of chamber music-making in this much-loved concert Hall.

We continue to be hugely grateful to all our Endowment Fund donors and thank them for their ongoing generosity to Wigmore Hall.To make a donation to Wigmore Hall’s Endowment Fund, please contact: Marie-Hélène Osterweil, Director of Development Telephone: 020 7258 8220 • Email: [email protected] Registered Charity No. 1024838


F R O M T H E A R C H I V E

In many ways, the history of Beethoven in performance at Wigmore Hall is a history of the Hall itself. Present at every significant milestone in our story from our opening concerts in 1901 to the present day, the works of Beethoven – chamber music, song and above all, piano – have been performed by hundreds of artists in thousands of concerts here. With this visual timeline of programmes from our archive, we visit some of the key moments in a journey spanning two world wars and nearly 120 years.

p The inaugural concert at Bechstein Hall on 31 May 1901. Ferrucio Busoni opened the programme with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E Op. 109, while the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe later performed the Romance in G Op. 40, wildly popular at the time.

u 24 April 1903 saw the first appearance here of Frederic Lamond, who tirelessly championed Beethoven’s piano works throughout his lifetime. This was the first all-Beethoven concert to be held at the Hall, and the first of Lamond’s near-annual concert series dedicated to the composer’s music.

u Surprisingly slow to take hold in the repertoire, Beethoven’s string quartets nevertheless received a significant boost in autumn 1905 when Joseph Joachim’s quartet performed the complete cycle of sixteen.

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p Elena Gerhardt sang ‘Adelaide’ in this concert in April 1907. Although Beethoven’s songs are less frequently performed today, for the first twenty years of the Hall’s history they proved as popular as all of his chamber music put together, with favourites including ‘In questa tomba’, ‘Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur’ and his Scottish Songs Op. 108.

p The actual authorship of the 11 Mödlinger Tänze WoO. 17 is uncertain; nevertheless, in 1907 they were given their England première here at one of the Hambourg family’s Subscription Concerts.

u In 1917, the young pianist Solomon included the Moonlight Sonata in his Wigmore Hall debut – which was also his temporary ‘farewell’ to the concert stage.

p According to this programme from 1907, violinist Henri Verbrugghen and pianist Philip E Halstead were giving the first performance in London of the complete set of Beethoven violin sonatas, having had success with the same series on the continent.

t Jean Gerardy and Leopold Godowsky were the first to bring the complete Beethoven cello sonatas to the Hall in 1911. Other cellists to feature his music in many of their programmes included Beatrice Harrison, whose first appearance at the Hall was in 1912, Gaspar Cassadó, Pablo Casals, and Guilhermina Suggia.

q The First World War had seen the Hall closed in 1915 when the Bechstein company’s assets were seized. It is clear, however, that no anti-German feeling extended to the music of the great Germanic composers, all of whose music remained consistently popular throughout the war, with Beethoven’s violin sonatas chosen as the programme for the 1917 reopening of what had now become Wigmore Hall.

u In 1925, the tenor Ruby Helder sang ‘Adelaide’ as part of her Wigmore Hall debut recital. Beethoven’s songs were a regular part of programming here until the Second World War, seen in concerts by John Coates, Roland Hayes, Brabazon Lowther and Elisabeth Schumann among many others. A notable absence is the cycle An die ferne Geliebte Op. 98, only sung seven times between 1920 and 1960.

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t Beethoven was a fixture in recitals by many of the period’s greatest pianists, including early turns by Benno Moiseiwitsch (shown here in 1910), Arthur Rubinstein and Alfred Cortot, who made his UK debut performing the Kreutzer Sonata with violinist Albert Spalding.

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t Champions of Beethoven’s chamber music in the inter-war years included Adolf Busch, whose acclaimed series of Busch Concerts in the 1930s helped to sustain the popularity of the string quartets, and Albert Sammons and William Murdoch. Sammons and Murdoch gave regular all-Beethoven sonata recitals and also popularised his string and piano trios as part of the Chamber Music Players with Lionel Tertis and Felix Salmond.

p To mark the 100th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, the Columbia Gramophone Company brought its recent invention to the Wigmore Hall stage and played a concert consisting entirely of gramophone records, including Dame Clara Butt singing ‘In questa tomba’ and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing movements from Beethoven’s symphonies.

p There is no sense that Beethoven’s music suffered any kind of drop in popularity during the Second World War; in fact, he is a constant presence. The pianist Vera Benenson gave a series of all-Beethoven concerts across the 1940s, while the Czech Trio brought our first ever all-Beethoven piano trio recital. This programme shows the Rosé Quartet playing movements from Op. 59 No. 2 and Op. 130 at a memorial event in 1943, held to commemorate Max Reinhardt, director of the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

p The Hall celebrated its 50-year anniversary in 1951 with two concerts, the first of which ended with a performance of the String Quartet in F Op. 95 by the recently-formed Amadeus Quartet.

p Isolde Menges’ string quartet was instrumental in raising the profile of Beethoven’s string quartets during this period. This complete cycle series in 1938 sparked a trend, with other quartets following in the post-war years.

p The post-war period brought a new vogue for performances of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. Given by Alfred Brendel in 1962, this series followed hot on the heels of series by Hans-Richter Haaser and Detlef Kraus.

t Few would be surprised that the young Lindsay String Quartet’s Wigmore Hall debut in 1970 featured Beethoven, as the quartet would go on to become legendary devotees of his music.

p Lamond, 21 years after his first all-Beethoven concert at the Hall, was also the first to bring a complete piano sonata cycle to our stage in 1934. He would continue performing Beethoven’s works here throughout the Second World War.

p Increasing interest in Early Music and historical performance led to concerts like this 1937 afternoon with Lucille Wallace and Clifford Curzon, charting the evolution of music for keyboard instruments. Clifford Curzon performed the Piano Sonata in D minor Op. 31 No. 2 on an early pianoforte from the collection of Arnold Dolmetsch.

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t More surprising places for Beethoven to turn up during the 1970s included an evening of poetry by Paul Roche, read by Sybil Thorndike to a background of piano music. In this case the Rondo a Capriccio Op. 129 accompanied a poem entitled ‘The death of two crabs’; meanwhile, the Plectrum Musica Quartet performed a Beethoven string quartet on mandolin, guitar and Spanish lute.

p The 75th anniversary concerts of 1976 secured the future of Wigmore Hall, in no small part due to the opening concert by Arthur Rubinstein – a concert which ended with his announcement that this had been his farewell to the stage. He opened the recital with the Sonata in E flat Op. 31 No. 3.

p In 1977, Graham Johnson’s Songmakers’ Almanac appeared on the Wigmore Hall scene for the first time in a programme of song to mark the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s death. The songs of Beethoven had been in a sharp decline ever since the Second World War, perhaps seen as a relic of a more sentimental age. Concerts such as this helped to revive them for a new generation of singers and audiences alike.

q The 1979 City of Portsmouth International String Quartet Competition winners’ recital ended with a performance of the String Quartet in E minor Op. 59 No. 2 by four young Hungarian musicians, then still known as the Takács-Nagy Quartet.

p The Nash Ensemble’s innovative programming set chamber works, song and piano repertoire in new contexts, with annual themed series such as this 1980/81 spotlight on Beethoven’s contemporaries.

t Our current Beethoven Festival celebrating 250 years since the composer’s birth is not the first Beethoven Festival to be held here. In 1989, the Lindsay String Quartet, following the huge success of their Haydn festival two years before, brought to the Wigmore Hall stage a festival celebrating every aspect of Beethoven’s life and music. 27 concerts over two weeks gave audiences an unprecedented opportunity to immerse themselves in the composer’s world, with performances from The Lindsays, Steven Isserlis, Richard Goode, György Pauk, Peter Frankl, Ralph Kirshbaum and ‘Young Artists’ concerts by Tasmin Little and Gerald Finley among a host of other artists.


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UNITED WE STAND

Pianist Tom Poster talks to Andrew Stewart about Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, its compelling Wigmore Hall debut concerts and celebration of diversity.

Arguments about how things are and how things ought to be soon escape the moral philosopher’s ivory tower to sow division in turbulent times. But they can also show how we might work together, to live together, to build better, fairer societies. The idea of forging union from diversity stands behind Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. The ensemble, set to make its Wigmore Hall debut this season with a weekend residency, grew from the concerns of its co-founders, the pianist Tom Poster and his violinist wife Elena Urioste. Their enterprise, based on the premise of performing great compositions with outstanding artists, aims to celebrate difference and explore shared values through the medium of chamber music.

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s Wigmore weekend comprises works for every combination from duo to septet. The programme opens on Friday 14 February with Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, arranged by Franz Hasenöhrl as a lusty ‘frolic’ for violin, double bass, horn, bassoon and clarinet, and continues with Fanny Mendelssohn’s Fantasia in G minor for cello and piano, Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro in A flat Op. 70, Glinka’s Trio Pathétique and Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet. Mozart’s Bassoon Quartet, an arrangement by Iain Farrington of the Bassoon Sonata K292, Ernő Dohnányi’s Sextet in C Op. 37 and Beethoven’s Septet in E flat Op. 20 are on the bill on Saturday 15 February.

‘Our audiences respond to meeting the artists in different guises, hearing them in twos or threes and then as one larger ensemble in the same concert,’ notes Poster. ‘I love the jigsaw element of devising programmes that show the greatest possible variety of music. There’s so much great chamber music that’s overlooked, but our flexible formation allows us to explore some wonderful pieces that are not well known.’ Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s mix of familiar and obscure repertoire, multiple voices and musicians from different

backgrounds, he adds, is not part of some politically correct box-ticking process or an exercise in social engineering; rather it reflects a positive response to the fractious state of world affairs and the rise of intolerance.

‘I think all musicians are troubled by the conflicts that are tearing communities and countries apart,’ reflects Poster. ‘When we thought about how we, as performers, could help heal division, we realised that we already work with a diverse group of people and chose to celebrate that. It’s about setting an example for the younger generation of audiences who don’t always see a diverse collective of classical musicians on stage.’

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective makes a gentle point by celebrating the breadth of chamber music and the diversity of the group’s musicians. The artform, he notes, binds musicians and their audiences together.

The ensemble’s ethos is expressed in its motto, ‘chamber music for everyone’, and desire to make music for and with people regardless of their nationality, skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, age and social background. ‘Chamber music is a great equaliser,’ says Poster. ‘There are many ways of approaching diversity, but Elena and I realised the wonderful people we work with in Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective reflect a representative cross-section of the world. We have a responsibility to show children and not-so-young people from all backgrounds that this music is for them. If you’re a pupil at a primary school where the majority of students are black and you go to a symphony or chamber concert and there’s not a single person of colour on stage, then I think it’s less likely that you’ll say, “Yes, that’s something I want to do” than if you see people who look like you.’

�It’s about setting an example for the younger generation of audiences who don’t always see a diverse collective of classical musicians on stage.’


CELTIC CONNECTIONSRough seas and rutted roads proved no barrier to musicians in the 1700s. Peter Whelan talks to Andrew Stewart about Hanoverian Britain’s rich musical life, the composers who travelled from London to Dublin and Edinburgh and his Wigmore Hall residency with Ensemble Marsyas.

of information and the music to show Ireland’s long heritage in classical music.’

Dubourg, who succeeded Kusser as Master and Composer of the State Music in Dublin, cast a considerable influence over music making in Ireland. One of Francesco Geminiani’s star pupils, he led the band for the first performance of Messiah and entranced audiences with his elaborate improvisations and wild solo cadenzas. Dublin’s international community of musicians included Geminiani, who lived in the city at various times in the 1730s and 1740s, the Italian castrato Matteo Rauzzini, whose pupils included the tenor Michael Kelly, and Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, the high-living castrato who eloped with the teenage daughter of a wealthy Limerick lawyer.

‘Tenducci escaped to Dublin, leaving his debts in London,’ explains Whelan. ‘He caused a scandal by marrying Dorothea or Dora Maunsell in a backstreet Catholic wedding, complete with mumblings in Latin. The problem was not that he was a castrato but that he was Catholic, while she came from a wealthy Protestant family! He was pursued around Ireland, imprisoned in Cork before hightailing it with Dora to Edinburgh in 1768. Dora’s family was mystified to discover that she was pregnant. Her father hired someone to visit Siena to find the man who had turned Tenducci into a castrato.’ The barber-surgeon’s testimony and reports that the singer always carried the remnants of his castration in a red-velvet purse confirmed that Tenducci was not the father of Dora’s child.

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Compositions by an Italian castrato who preserved the shrivelled offcuts of his adolescent visit to the barber-surgeon and a demon fiddle player who led the band for the première of Messiah are among the works programmed by Ensemble Marsyas for their residency this season. The four concert series, at the invitation of John Gilhooly, opens on 30 December with a special Hogmanay bill and continues on 30 March, 26 May and 1 July to cover a broad range of repertoire associated with 18th-century Dublin, Edinburgh and London. Its contents offer a welcome corrective to what the historian EP Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, the patronising way in which figures from the past are so easily marginalised as incidental or insignificant.

A virtuoso on harpsichord and baroque bassoon, Peter Whelan is brimming with ideas about neglected music from an age of expansion and discovery. The Irish-born musician’s relationship with Wigmore Hall includes solo appearances as bassoonist with groups such as The English Concert, La Serenissima and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and dates with Ensemble Marsyas. ‘It’s the ideal place to play and listen to period-instrument performances,’ he observes. ‘Wigmore Hall has the perfect acoustics in so many ways and such a warm and appreciative audience. I’m really excited about our Ensemble Marsyas Residency this season. We’ll look at music written for Dublin in Handel’s time and after, and explore the movement of native and foreign musicians between London, Dublin and Edinburgh. There are so many wonderful works by virtuoso performer-composers who were vastly popular at the time but are almost unknown today.’

Whelan’s passion for the music is matched by his knowledge of the robust pan-European musical ecosystem that developed in the 1700s. ‘Musicians worked out exactly the best times to travel across land and sea,’ he notes. ‘They were able to form an international touring circuit and, like Handel, achieve fame far from their home countries. Many outstanding performers travelled to Ireland and Scotland. In Dublin you find people like Johann Sigismund Kusser, a Hungarian who became composer to the vice-regal court at Dublin Castle in the early 1700s, the English violinist and composer Matthew Dubourg, and the Italians Francesco Geminiani and Tommaso Giordani. We now have the sources


CELTIC CONNECTIONS‘Soon after he arrived in Edinburgh,

Tenducci gave a concert at St Cecilia’s Hall and the programme for it has survived. We’ll perform some of the Scottish tunes that JC Bach, the ‘London Bach’, arranged for Tenducci as part of our Hogmanay celebration. We’ve built our residency around the touring circuit that linked 18th-century London, Dublin and Edinburgh. So many musicians travelled to and from Ireland in the 1700s. It seems likely that Dubourg invited Handel to Dublin. He knew Handel was having a tough time in London and that there was a financial killing to be had from presenting concerts in Dublin. Handel wrote about the high standard of violin playing in Dublin and I’m sure was energised by the success he had there.’

Ensemble Marsyas is named for the Greek satyr Marsyas, who dared challenge the god Apollo to a musical duel and paid for his hubris with his life. The group made its international breakthrough in 2007 with a much-admired victory at the International Music Antiqua Competition in Bruges and has built a strong reputation since with critically acclaimed recordings for the Linn label, imaginative programming and understanding of the fluid boundaries between music written for formal concerts and tunes performed in taverns, pleasure gardens and coffee houses. The ensemble’s discography includes Edinburgh 1742, an album comprising Handel’s Concerto for French horns, the Concerti Grossi Op. 3 and ‘Old Scots Tunes’ by Francesco Barsanti, works written for or associated with the

Edinburgh Musical Society, and recordings of Handel’s secular cantata Apollo e Dafne, quartets and concertos for wind instruments by Johann Friedrich Fasch and trio sonatas by Jan Dismas Zelenka.

In addition to chamber music for wind instruments, Ensemble Marsyas often expands to take on projects for orchestra, choir and vocal soloists. The flexible approach is open to instrumental combinations that can seem unusual today but which contributed to the abundant variety of sounds heard in the cities and large towns of Hanoverian Britain. Its Wigmore Hall residency flows naturally from Peter Whelan’s revelatory project to reconstruct the Irish State Musick, works written during the period in Anglo-Irish history known as the Ascendancy, the boom time of Georgian Dublin’s development as the second largest city in the British Isles.

‘Buildings were shooting up in Dublin, money was to be made by various means, dubious and otherwise, and there was a burgeoning music scene,’ he notes. ‘Reading about the city’s boom led me to explore the backstory of what Handel would have discovered when he came to Dublin in 1742 for the first performance of Messiah. Dublin’s position as Britain’s second city lasted over a hundred years. That built strong connections between musicians on both sides of the Irish Sea. Our Wigmore Hall residency will explore Handel’s links to Dublin, look at the more tenuous links between Purcell and Ireland, and trace the connections between Mozart and Irish singers, especially Michael Kelly, who sang Basilio in the first performance of Le nozze di Figaro.’

Kelly, adds Peter Whelan, was raised listening to the virtuoso musicians who performed at Dublin Castle, where his father, a wine merchant, served as Master of Ceremonies. ‘Michael went to Italy in the 1780s, where he was known as Signor O’Kelly or Ochelli, and was recruited for the Italian Opera in Vienna. His Reminiscences follow the old Irish line of never allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story! But they paint a vivid picture of the musicians who came to his father’s house in search of the best wine in Dublin and gave young Michael lessons. There are so many interesting connections to be explored and we’ll bring some of those to light at Wigmore Hall this season’.

Ensemble Marsyas will begin its residency on Monday 30 December at 7.30pm


with Freya Waley-Cohen, Associate Composer, and Claire Roberts, Rosie Johnson RPS/Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer 2019/20

F: How did you get into composing?

C: When I was 13, I entered a competition called Young Composer of Dyfed covering three counties, and I live in one of the counties. They put on a competition in different age categories and get a really good professional ensemble to workshop your pieces. I was very lucky to have that experience when I was 13 with a string quartet. I went on to enter the competition again when I was 16 with a marimba duo, O Duo, and that year I won the competition and thought, ‘I want to be a composer now.’

F: That’s so nice! What were your early influences?

C: Because I was learning about the marimba ensemble, I listened to a lot of Steve Reich, and minimalist music which used pitched percussion as a rhythmic phasing technique, so I got really into that sort of composing. I also got really interested in impressionist music through my violin playing. I did an orchestral course where we played a concert of French music – Debussy’s La Mer, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé – and I just fell in love with that kind of soundworld.

F: Was it because you played the violin that it occurred to you to first apply for the Young Composer competition at 13?

C: Yes.

F: I was also a violinist growing up (although I don’t play in front of anyone anymore!)

C: What are you working on at the moment?

F: I’m working on a song for The King’s

country, society, age groups. I wanted to find out how it’s affected both their sense of identity and their relationships with people that they love, and if they have managed to find a way to have conversations about it despite those differences, how they’ve managed that. So I have a lot of very fascinating and sometimes very sad personal testimonies from people and now I am turning them into a song! What are you working on?

Singers. When they first called me up, they said they had a new charity called Finding Harmony which is about bringing people together through music, and looking at rifts in society and how singing together can bring people together. They asked me to write about Brexit, but something about people’s similarities rather than their political differences. I have interviewed and sent questions to as many people as possible from different parts of the

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MUSICAL CONVERSATIONS...


LEARNING FESTIVAL 2020: MUSICAL CONVERSATIONSWigmore Hall Learning’s festival in 2020 takes place between Monday 10 and Saturday 22 February 2020. Musical Conversations invites you to explore the many different ways we create, perform, listen to and respond to music. We delve into the concept of musical conversation, a notion at the heart of chamber music, and invite you, your ears and your voices to take part.

For more information see wigmore-hall.org.uk/musicalconversations

C: I’m probably influenced more by non-musical areas of the arts and composers that aren’t strictly contemporary classical. I’m interested in composers who’ve taken their music to other spaces and collaborated across the arts, so that links to enjoying working with Harry, who’s an amazing poet, and I’m looking to be working with some dancers in January. I like to take inspiration from visual arts as well as composers who are in the post-minimalist, indie-classical kind of area who collaborate across genres. There are a lot of groups and ensembles in America, like yMusic and Eighth Blackbird, who are doing really cool stuff across genres, linking classical music with other areas of music within our culture.

F: Cool! What are you looking forward to as the Rosie Johnson RPS/Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer?

C: I’m looking forward to the commission itself, that’s really exciting because I get to write for a really cool ensemble that are unique in the kind of stuff they’re doing.

F: It actually ties into what you were just saying about the type of sounds and music and cross-genre, cross-arts idea, so that’s great.

C: That’s going to be really exciting, and today I got to meet some people from the Wigmore Hall Learning department who go and do interactive work in schools or across other areas of our society, working with people who have suffered domestic abuse, people who are living with dementia, people who come to Wigmore for concert experiences for young children or expectant parents. I’ll be able to attend and learn about how they can change my outlook not just on the music I’m creating, but generally what’s happening in the arts world.

F: I think that stuff is so important for society in general and the future of music. It’s really amazing to be doing that.

C: What are you looking forward to about being Wigmore Hall’s Associate Composer?

F: It’s really lovely to be working with you again and seeing how you develop, because we’ve worked together once before on a one-off project in Wales, and at that point we only had one session together. So it’s really nice to be able to see you blossom as an amazing composer and artist. I’m excited about writing a trio for the Albion Quartet for 2 November, which I am also working on at the same time as this King’s Singers piece. I’m really excited about that November day in general because it’s so wonderful to have curated these two concerts and to be talking about what it all means to me in between. After that, I’m doing a song cycle for Katie Bray and the Britten Sinfonia players and revisiting an arrangement I did of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder to tweak for them. It’s all really exciting!

C: A piece for a competition which is anonymous, so maybe I shouldn’t say!

F: Can you tell us anything about it without giving it away?

C: It’s going to be a set of miniatures. The first one is called ‘I Knew’, the second one is ‘I Knew You’, and the third is ‘I Knew You Didn’t Love Me’.

Harry Jelley has written the text. I gave him those titles and wanted to see what he did with it. The idea for the titles came from a Noname song, who is somebody I really like listening to at the minute.

F: I really like Noname as well!

C: Have you seen her Tiny Desk Concert? It’s really good!

F: I haven’t, I’ve just listened to her album. I will check out Tiny Desk when I get home!

I asked you what your early influences were, and we’ve talked a little bit about Harry and being influenced by his words and the collaboration. Can you tell me more about what inspires you now and how you would describe your approach and style?

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TALKING BEETHOVEN WITH

JONATHAN BISS

Audience member: What do you think it is about the Op. 26 that really attracted Chopin’s attention?

Jonathan: It’s an interesting question. Chopin, unlike most of the great composers of his era, claimed not to like Beethoven, but this was one piece that he admitted to liking. It’s interesting obviously that this sonata has a funeral march and Chopin himself famously wrote a funeral march sonata, and maybe this was his inspiration. It’s just a hypothesis, but Op. 26 is the first of Beethoven’s sonatas to really be, in a sense, freeform, to depart from a very classical convention; it starts with this glorious set of variations. I think it would have been a shock to that audience that instead of a sonata allegro it begins in this leisurely way – and I think maybe Chopin liked the slight unconventionality of it. I also think – and I have to be very careful about how I phrase this – there is this notion that Beethoven didn’t write beautiful melody, which is nonsense. But there is something particularly songful and beautiful about Op. 26’s first movement and Chopin, who had this incredible gift for bel canto on the piano, he probably would have appreciated that.

Audience member: Could I ask you, rather than playing, how (if at all) you listen to these sonatas? Do you listen to lots of other interpretations, take on board ideas from others and maybe listen to some where you think ‘Well, that’s not how I would want to do it, but actually yes I rather like it’?

Jonathan: First of all I should say that while I’m working on and performing a piece I really try not to listen, and I said yesterday [in his Coursera talk on 28 September*] that it’s kind of a joke and kind of not a joke that I’d rather commit my own sins than perpetrate someone else’s. I guess another way I could put it is that what I want most to be able to do in a concert is to convey a relationship between me and the music that’s honest, sincere, and unself-conscious. The more I’m comparing myself or my ideas against someone else’s, the more likely I think I am to let that self-consciousness creep in. Having said that, I’ve spent my life listening to live performances and recordings of these pieces. Many of them have been incredibly inspiring to me. Some of them I listened to so many times I’m sure that performance is etched into my mind and is, in some way, part of my conception of the piece – even if I would rather it not be. To answer the other part of the question: yes, I’ve absolutely had the experience with Beethoven and with any music of hearing a performance and thinking, ‘I would not do that, but it was incredibly powerful’. If I listen to something and I can understand how the person came to the decision, I’m usually convinced by it even if I would maybe come to a different one.

Audience member: I really enjoyed the courses you put on Coursera on the Beethoven sonatas.* I’m wondering if the process of developing those courses influenced you in some way, how you view and interpret those sonatas?

Jonathan: Every kind of teaching I’ve done has had an influence on my playing. Like most musicians, so much of what I do is first of all by instinct, and even before I started giving the Coursera class, when I started teaching my own students, it was such a tricky thing to have to say why about a lot of things that I

had just done really pretty much unthinkingly my whole life. It forced me to ask myself a lot of difficult questions, like sometimes I had to distinguish between the things where I thought, ‘Well, that’s really essential to the piece, you can’t not do that and still be faithful to the music’, and then realise that other things were just very personal, and I should let the student go their own way and not impose my own maybe bad idea on them.

In terms of the Coursera class, yes – I never saw the faces of the students, they were recorded on video, but knowing that many of the people had no exposure to Beethoven forced me to go to the core, and to say ‘What are the things about Beethoven generally that someone has to know? What are the things about this piece that are fundamental?’ That really focusses one’s mind and energy in a certain way, because with one of these sonatas, my lectures are usually an hour long and I could talk for a year and just scratch the surface! I couldn’t tell you ‘Well, now I play that F sharp louder’, it’s not that concrete, but I think in a deeper way it definitely has had an effect.

Audience member: These pieces that you’ve played tonight cover a 10-year period in Beethoven’s musical development. I wonder how you would describe or articulate how he developed as a composer in those 10 years and perhaps how he developed as a pianist? Do you find that there are new challenges coming with the slightly later pieces in this set of sonatas that you’ve played tonight, or not?

Jonathan: I think there are a few major points in terms of how he developed as a composer and as a writer for piano. I think the sonatas up to Op. 22 are conventional in terms of form. They’re not conventional in every way, but Haydn and Mozart would have recognised them as piano sonatas. From Op. 26 (in this concert there were two sonatas from that period, Op. 26 and Op. 27 No. 1) where it’s clearly a conscious choice: ‘I’m gonna really reimagine what a piano sonata can look like and be shaped like’, and actually all four in that group including ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Pastoral’ are really major reimaginings of what a sonata can be.

Preceding concert programme:

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor Op. 2 No. 1 Piano Sonata No. 9 in E Op. 14 No. 1 Piano Sonata No. 13 in E flat Op. 27 No. 1 ‘Quasi una fantasia’

interval

Piano Sonata No. 12 in A flat Op. 26 ‘Funeral March’ Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Op. 53 ‘Waldstein’

Following the first evening concert in his Beethoven Piano Sonata series on Sunday 29 September 2019, Jonathan Biss hosted a post-concert Q&A in the Hall. Below are some highlights from this discussion.


*Jonathan Biss is hosting talks about his Coursera lectures concurrent with his sonata series at Wigmore Hall. The next talk will be on Friday 20 December at 11.00am. See wigmore-hall.org.uk for further details.

And then, I think one of the big stories of Beethoven’s evolution, and this will get into the question of how the ‘Waldstein’ is new, is that early in his life the pieces begin heavier and grow lighter, and by the end of his life it’s really precisely the opposite. If you look at Op. 111 which ends with this monumental statement, or you look at the ‘Hammerklavier’ which has the longest and greatest slow movement ever written, tying them to this massive craggy fugue, it’s like 27 minutes of music as a unit at the end of the piece. So he totally reversed the model and I think the ‘Waldstein’ is really a huge pivot point in that way because you feel when it starts, even though it’s pianissimo at the bottom of the piano, you feel that this is an enormous structure coming into being; it builds and it builds, right the way to the end, and I think it’s the first sonata where, if you consider the introduction part of the last movement, that’s the longer movement and that was totally new at that point.

So that’s one of the major things that changed. The other thing I would just say in terms of his development (I mean, it’s a huge topic, but just to give some major points) is that I think you can hear in the early period that this was a person who wanted to prove himself. You can hear the desire to be impressive; pianistically impressive, compositionally impressive, ‘look at all the ideas I have’. While obviously the later pieces are as full of ideas, there’s less and less interest in that external aspect – it’s more personal exploration each time out. So that feels very different and I felt I was conscious of it tonight, even playing the ‘Waldstein’, which is by no means a late piece, felt really different from the earlier ones, and when I play the start of Op. 109, it feels like a private communion in a way that I wouldn’t say is the case in the early pieces.


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VIJAY IYER - Wigmore Hall

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