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PRESS NOTE
Malvern Concert Club
Founded by Sir Edward Elgar in 1903
President:
Michael Kennedy CBE
Registered Charity 506329 Hon. Assistant Secretary: Ernie Kay MBE,
76 Graham Road, Malvern, Worcs. WR14
2HU Tel: 01684 567917 Fax: 01684893180
Email: ekmalv@tiscali.co.uk CLASSICAL ‘RISING
STARS’ COME TO MALVERN The term ‘rising stars’ is much used in the world of the
arts with music being no exception. However
it can be applied without any qualification to the group Malvern Concert Club
have invited to give its final 2008 concert - the Carducci String Quartet . They are widely recognised as
one of today’s most exciting young string quartets.
Winners of the Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York and major
prizes at the Bordeaux, London and Osaka competitions, the quartet has
established an enthusiastic International following.
This Anglo-Irish group studied with members of
the Amadeus, Alban Berg, Chilingirian, Takacs and Vanbrugh quartets and, as part
of the ProQuartet professional training programme in France. They are now in
demand all around the UK and Ireland and their name is to be seen on the
schedules of many prestigious venues. Internationally
they have toured to
the USA, Japan,
France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Italy,
where after performing numerous concerts at the Castagnetto-Carducci Festival in
2001 the quartet adopted the name “Carducci” with the blessing of the
Mayor.
They recently established their own
record label 'Carducci Classics', launched with a CD of Haydn String Quartets,
and the Quartet was nominated for the 2008 Royal Philharmonic Society Chamber
Music Award. The quartet are
passionate about taking Classical music to the next generation and run chamber
music courses for young musicians in France and Ireland, the latter country
being home to second violinist Michelle Fleming and violist Eoin Schmidt-Martin.
They have local connections running
an annual Festival at the glorious church at Highnam, near Gloucester, where
incidentally Emma and Matthew Denton, cello and leader – the English members
of the quartet, were married. They bring to
Malvern a programme of well-loved quartet classics; an early work by Haydn,
marking the bicentenary of his death, Mendelssohn’s opus 13, to mark the
bicentenary of his birth, and Ravel’s glorious work for this combination of
artists. The Club again expects the large audiences it has had this season to come to this concert at The Forum Malvern Theatres at 7 30 pm on Thursday 13 November. Single tickets for non-members are now on sale (Adult £15, concessions £14, students £5) from the Theatres Box Office 01684 892277.
EK 02 11 08
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MALVERN
TO HEAR
REMARKABLE MUSIC FROM 2nd WORLD WAR Following its
successful start to its 106th season by the Nash Ensemble, Malvern
Concert Club is set to welcome another fine British group on 23 October. The
Gould Piano Trio were selected as British “Rising
Stars” in 1998 and have since then developed to become one of the finest
chamber ensembles, boasting an impressive discography, with festival appearances
at Edinburgh, Cheltenham, City of London, Bath, Aldeburgh and the BBC Proms. In
their regular and extensive overseas tours they have covered the major venues in
New York including the Lincoln Centre, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the
Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, as well as recitals in Paris, Cologne, Athens
and Vienna and also the Far East and New Zealand.
But whether at home or abroad, the trio have constantly striven to engage
new audiences through outreach programmes, often working with school children -
as filmed by the BBC during the 2006 Leeds International Piano Competition. Indeed,
while playing most of the established master-works of the trio repertoire –
their discography includes the complete trios of both Mendelssohn and Brahms –
they have an artistic ambition to extend boundaries, challenging audiences (and
themselves!) with contemporary works and commissioning new works. The connection
with Robert Plane has borne fruit in the trio’s Naxos project of recent years
to record the late English Romantics, combining the Piano Trios of Stanford and
Bax with their clarinet chamber music, short-listed for a Gramophone award.
in a new perspective. The
Gould’s residency at the RNCM in Manchester gives them the opportunity to
build relationships with young ensembles, introducing them to a wider
repertoire, probing deeper into the meaning of the scores and giving regular
performances in the city’s busy concert schedule. 2008-9
will see two appearances at London’s Wigmore Hall celebrating the bi-centenary
of Mendelssohn’s birth with his two trios and special concerts to mark the
birth of Messiaen 100 years ago, performing his visionary Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time),
their latest recording with Robert Plane on Chandos. Since winning
the Royal Overseas League Music Competition in London in 1992, clarinettist Robert
Plane has enjoyed a successful and varied
career as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral principal. Robert has become particularly well known for his
best-selling Naxos recording of Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto, which was recently
selected as the recommended recording of the Concerto in BBC Radio 3's 'Building
a Library'. It was
with Finzi’s Concerto that Robert made his Swiss debut in 2004, playing it in
Zurich’s prestigious Tonhalle. Other major European Halls in which he has
performed include Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional de Musica (Mozart Concerto with
the City of London Sinfonia) and London’s Barbican (London premiere of Diana
Burrell’s Clarinet Concerto with Northern Sinfonia, a work written for and
premiered by Robert in 1996). He
makes frequent concerto appearances with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales,
with whom Robert is principal clarinet. His performance of Rossini’s
‘Introduction, Theme and Variations’ was broadcast live on national BBC TV
from the 2004 BBC Proms in the Park. He
particularly enjoys performing with the Gould Piano Trio and together they
established their own annual chamber music festival in the picturesque village
of Corbridge in Northumberland in 1999.
Robert
is married to the violinist Lucy Gould and they live in Cardiff with their
daughters Florence and Iris and son Rufus. This
exciting group of players will bring to Malvern an early Beethoven Piano Trio,
Brahms’ magnificent late Clarinet Trio and the extraordinary Quartet for
the End of Time by French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose centenary
is reached this year. This, perhaps
his best-known work, was written while he was
interned in a German prison camp, where he discovered among his fellow prisoners
a clarinettist, a violinist and a violoncellist. The success of a short trio
written for them led him to add seven more movements to this Interlude, and a
piano to the ensemble, to create the Quartet.
Messiaen and his friends first performed it for their 5000 fellow
prisoners on January 15, 1941. According
to the composer, the Quartet was intended not to be a commentary on the
Apocalypse, nor to refer to his own captivity, but to be a kind of musical
extension of the Biblical account, and of the concept of the end of Time as the
end of past and future and the beginning of eternity. There are eight movements
because God rested on the seventh day after creation, a day which extended into
the eighth day of timeless eternity. The Club again
expects a big audience for this major event.
Membership is high; single tickets (Adult £15, concessions £14,
students £5) for the concert, at The Forum Malvern Theatres at 7 30 pm on
Thursday 23 October, are available from the Theatres Box Office 01684 892277. EK 12
10 08 |
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