Mary Cooke

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” cries King Lear in the storm on the heath, and the wind players of PIVA certainly blew with very swollen cheeks to create the sounds of Shakespeare’s theatre. Keswick Music Society‘s concert at Theatre by the Lake on Tuesday evening attracted a large and enthusiastic audience for […]

“The Haydn’s bonkers,” said Edward Keenan, the viola player in The Brompton Quartet. And he was right. The playful, agitated, quizzical, quirky questioning of the opening phrases of Haydn’s String Quartet in C major set the pattern for the music that followed, uncertain, fragmentary, teasing but taking us on a journey that led to the

Four trumpeters – Jo Harris, Emma Bassett, Clara Hyder and Emily Ashby – and on stage ten, perhaps a dozen trumpets – in C, in B flat, bass trumpets and piccolo trumpets and even a flugel horn and mutes of all shapes and sizes. And with all this plumbing we were taken on a world

The violin and guitar are complementary instruments. The violinist bows the melody, flowing, resonant, singing, with a powerful voice. The guitarist plucks the harmony, rhythmic, complex, with an intimate, thoughtful voice Harriet Mackenzie was statuesque, every inch a classical virtuoso in her elegant dress. James Boyd seemed, in all aspects, a folk guitarist, until his

Tonight, the famous Primrose Quartet became the Primrose Trio. However, first it was minus two. They were reduced to Susanne Stanzeleit on violin and Andrew Fuller on cello, but they were playing a remarkable display piece by the Norwegian composer, Johan Halvorsen. He had rewritten Handel’s dazzling harpsichord Passacaglia for the two instruments, and it

Two brothers, both in black, sitting with their backs to each other: one, Thomas Scott, at the keyboard of the Steinway grand with the lid defiantly open, and the other, Jonathan, almost hidden from view, commanding the magnificent Harrison organ with its two keyboards, its array of pedals, its fifteen stops and its towering assemblage

Three centuries, three countries, three composers and three performers playing three piano trios. Haydn’s last piano trio was written in Vienna when he was 64 in 1796. Faure was 78 and living in Paris when he composed his only piano trio in 1923 and in 1847, Schumann was 43 and, newly returned to Dresden, was