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Brancaster Midsummer Music |
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Brancaster Midsummer Music 2008A regular feature of our programmes in recent
years has been the music of composers celebrating an anniversary. This
year is no different though, for the first time, we are celebrating
landmarks in the lives of two of our finest living composers, Robin
Holloway and David Matthews, both of whom will be 65 in 2008. I am
delighted that both composers will be at the concerts to introduce their
music. In addition, we shall mark the centenary of the remarkable French
composer, Olivier Messiaen, whose deeply personal music was influenced by
birdsong, the music of India and his own intense Catholicism. A curiosity
in our opening concert will be the Capriccio for string orchestra by Alan
Gray who, although he lived and taught in Cambridge, owned a holiday home
in Brancaster at the beginning of the 20th century. As always,
the programmes will contain many fine works by the great composers of the
past, including music by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Ravel,
Poulenc and Prokofiev. Once again, we have invited a wide range of
talented artists from around the world. To open the Festival, we are
delighted to welcome back for a concert of English string music the
Orchestra of the Swan, the leading chamber orchestra of the West Midlands.
Although based in Stratford-on-Avon, they play regular concert series in
several Midlands towns, including Birmingham Town Hall, and, as last
year’s audience will testify, they have established a fine reputation
for the high quality of their performances. As soloist, we have the French
flautist, Patrick Gallois, one of the world’s outstanding prtformers
with whom I collaborated many years ago on Penderecki’s Flute Concerto
in Malmo. His playing then impressed me greatly as have his recent
recordings of Vivaldi’s Flute Concertos with the Amadeus Chamber
Orchestra and his performances of Takemitsu’s music for flute with the
BBC Symphony Orchestra. I look forward to working with him again and to
hearing the stunning programme of masterpieces for the flute that he and
his wife, Cecilia Lofstrand, have planned for the first Saturday evening. Our concert at Houghton Hall sees a welcome
return by the Sacconi String Quartet who, since their first appearance at
Brancaster in 2005, have taken the musical world by storm. Even more
excitingly, they will give the British premiere of Robin Holloway’s
Second String Quartet, a work which Brancaster Midsummer Music has
co-commissioned with financial assistance from the RVW Trust. The world
premiere will be given six days earlier in Madrid. It is always exciting
to be present at the first performance of a new work and I anticipate that
demand will be high for the 140 seats that we are able to sell at Houghton
Hall, especially as the rest of the programme is made up of marvellous
music by Haydn and Ravel. This year, we are giving an additional concert
in Old Hunstanton Church. Martin Neary, formerly Organist of Winchester
Cathedral and, more recently, Westminster Abbey, will conjure the most
amazing sounds from the Church’s old Walker organ and convince his
audience that they are in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris as he plays
Messiaen’s stunning piece, L’Ascension. He will open and close
his recital with three great masterworks by Bach. On the second Friday, we welcome to Brancaster
for the first time the Gould Piano Trio, three excellent young musicians
whose cellist is, by chance, Martin Neary’s daughter, Alice. The centre-piece
of their recital is the wonderfully elegiac Second Piano Trio by David
Matthews. The recital ends with Schubert’s magnificent Piano Trio in B
flat, another of the great works that he produced in the last year of his
tragically-short life. The Festival ends with the third of Mozart’s
great pieces for wind ensemble, all of which we have performed in recent
years. This time, the Serenade for thirteen wind instruments will be
played by the Orchestra of the Swan Wind Soloists. It’s one of
Mozart’s finest and most ambitious pieces and will be preceded by three
short and fairly light-hearted pieces: a little Sinfonia by Donizetti,
which might well have been composed as an overture to one of his comic
operas, the delightful Wind Nonet on Polish themes, composed by my old
friend, David Beck, for a concert in Poland last year, and Robin
Holloway’s Divertimento No.2, which he composed in 1972. Every Festival and concert series hopes that
its programmes will find favour with the music-loving public. We believe
that, once again in West Norfolk, we have a Festival of great music played
by great musicians. Peter Marchbank 1st January 2008
Patron Sir Peter Maxwell Davies Vice-Presidents
The Countess of
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