PrettyInScarlett

Almost the end of November and another term of excellent concerts is almost concluded. The high quality continues  - this Friday, 24th November, featured music for gamelan . I have read with interest about gamelan, notably in the excellent The Other Classical Musics , but have never heard the ensemble live. Leeds music students who had spent this term learning gamelan music, performed a mixture of traditional and modern pieces under the name The Golden Thread. I was NOT disappointed! I liked all of it! But particular mention to the traditional pieces Lancaran Singanebah and Lancaran Tropong-bang - excellent, immersive stuff - and the new pieces, firstly When East Meets West . This used gamelan timbres to sample Western popular music - I'm sure I heard 'Another One Bites The Dust'!! - complete with sunglasses wearing students. The second, It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas , added a shadow puppet show to the performance, referencing the traditional artfor...

Mid-month and my concert calendar is in full swing. When tickets for Gabriela Montero were released, I decided to treat myself to a day trip to Wigmore Hall on 13th November. Definitely worth the effort! The recital programme was Schumann's Kinderszenen Op. 15 and Shostakovich's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor, Op. 61 . First, the Kinderszenen . Deftly demonstrating the variety within this set of piece, the intensity of Gabriela's performance went up and up - at the point of Traumerei , any audience murmur hushed completely; after this most famous piece, I thought the performance got even better.  The Shostakovich Piano Sonata was (is) a complete contrast. Written during wartime and in between his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, the sonata, whilst a memorial to former piano teacher Leonid Nikolaev, also contains a commentary on the times. The three movements are dramatic, lyrical, tragic. For me - a lot of angst in the first movement, moving from an almost skip, t...

The first two concerts of Skipton Music's 2017/18 season maintained the high quality I have come to expect of the concert series. First up in October was Doric String Quartet , with a programme of Mendelssohn, Thomas Adès and Haydn. The Adès, The Four Quarters (2011), was probably unknown to everyone except the quartet - but definitely worth investigating. The piece is in a classical string quartet model and follows the process of a day in time, comprising 4 movements: Nightfalls , Serenade: Morning Dew, Days and The Twenty-fifth Hour . I particularly liked Morning Dew - concurrently reminding me of early morning light hitting blades of grass, or morning commuters arriving in a big city imagined as colliding atoms. Days hat 'flap of the day' and 'mid-afternoon meander' aspects to it. The Mendelssohn (Quartet in E flat, Op, 12) and Haydn (String Quartet Op. 20 No. 5) were very enjoyable. Fast forward a few weeks (feels like fast forward!!) to Trio Con Brio...