Review

Programme    Rebecca Clarke: Piano Trio, Paul Schoenfield: Cafe Music, Brahms: Trio no 1 in B Major, Op.8 ( Revised version) The Piano Trio by Rebecca Clarke trio was a revelation. Here was the powerful individual voice of a female composer who was unjustly neglected for decades. Clarke was born in Britain of American and German parents. […]

Keswick Music Society Concert 24th February 2024: Review Last Saturday Keswick Music Society treated its audience to another outstanding musical evening at St. John’s Church. The Society’s previous concert featured the distinguished and much-loved pianist Dame Imogen Cooper. This time it was two youthful musicians who are building their careers and reputations: Charlotte Spruit, a Dutch

Imogen Cooper’s concert was attended by one of the largest audiences of recent years, and she lived magnificently up to all expectations as one of the most distinguished and cherished pianists of our time.  Her programme with music by Schubert, Bach, Thomas Adès and Beethoven took us on a fascinating musical journey and it was

Lara Melda is a young and brilliant pianist currently delighting audiences around Britain, Europe and the antipodes: her career, launched when she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2010 as a 16 year old, continued through college and later with such celebrated mentors as Alfred Brendel. She is now widely recognised

On Saturday evening Keswick Music Society started its 23/24 season with a superb concert featuring a young London-based string ensemble, The Alkyona Quartet, in the Society’s new venue at St. John’s Church. KMS has been looking for a permanent home since the previous arrangement with the Theatre by the Lake, which had hosted the Society’s

“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

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

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

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