#44 Geoffrey Paterson: Conductor

In spite of the difficulties presented by the orchestration, in the end – if you work at it – it does work! 

“At the performance I spoke with the audience from podium before we started to play, and one of the things I said was that it was very likely that none of the audience had ever heard the work before. It’s not widely known within orchestral circles that Joachim’s orchestration of Schubert’s Grand Duo piano duet exists. The work is not published in a set with the other symphonies and it’s quite a challenge just to locate the parts. So I think this difficulty in finding the parts has something to do with why the piece isn’t often played. 

Another reason is that the orchestration, as we discovered, is frankly rather strange! It’s fascinating, but it’s not really like a Schubert symphony - because of the way it’s orchestrated. 

Schubert wrote this large scale piano duet (four movements, forty minutes long) in 1824 for two pupils at a time when he was not able to play because he was ill.  After Schubert died, Schumann thought that this piano duet was either a reduction, or sketches for ‘the lost symphony’ and encouraged Joachim, who was only 24 at the time and already a very famous violinist and part time composer, to orchestrate it. Schumann  wanted Joachim to  reconstruct this Schubert symphony that had apparently been lost. So in 1855, thirty-one years after the duet was written, that’s what Joachim did. 

I don’t know what Schumann thought of the result. Certainly it’s not orchestrated in the way Schubert would have done. A lot had changed in the twenty-seven years since his death. In 1855, when Joachim made the arrangement, Wagner was already at work on The Ring. It’s already a completely different musical landscape. Of course Joachim was more aligned with Schumann and Brahms than he was with Wagner, but the orchestration isn’t particularly Brahmsian either. 

It’s quite densely orchestrated. One of the most striking things is that Joachim worked through with a kind of impatience; either with a quest to do something different or because he didn’t quite have the confidence in his decisions. He’s very reluctant to let one instrumental group take a melody, or an accompaniment figure, from the beginning to the end. In most symphonic repertoire, at least in the way that themes are first presented, you can talk of ‘the violin melody’ or ‘the clarinet melody’ or the ‘flute melody’, but in this orchestration it’s almost impossible to do that because no melody really belongs fully in one instrumental group before he passes it to another, even in the first presentation. That’s very unusual! 

A harsh judgement would be that it’s slightly incompetent. And maybe that’s an attitude that people take and that’s a reason it’s not performed very often.  But from a twenty-first century point of view, with the whole history of the first part of the twentieth century, with neo-classicism and particularly with composers such as Stravinsky who deconstructed earlier music, it’s very interesting to hear that in the mid-nineteenth century, there is an orchestration that uses similar principles.  For example, in the last movement, sometimes only two or three notes of a tune are played by one instrumental group before the tune is then passed on to another group, and then to another group, and so on.  

It’s quite disorienting to listen to - in Pulcinella, Stravinsky does something similar, but he also tweaks other elements of the music so we immediately recognise that there are inverted commas around the source material,  But with Joachim it’s not the case – the material is literally Schubert’s music from the duet, it’s just the way it’s arranged. And that is very odd. 

In conducting the work there are a lot more basic problems to solve than there would be in a symphony of that era because you have to balance these melodies, you have to dovetail things. But firstly, the players have to understand what role they play in the texture and when you have quite dense textures with counterpointed two melodies, plus an accompaniment figure, plus a bass line … even if it were orchestrated in such a way that people had longer to get into the zone of what they were doing, you have to clarify those lines. And when those lines are not carried through within an instrumental group, each section has to really understand who they’re passing the melody to, where they’re getting it from, how you balance between very different instrumental tone colours in such a way that in the audience, you hear a through-line. 

At the first rehearsal there was no problem with accuracy, but the music itself sounded very disjointed; everything was constantly changing in terms of the tone colour and dynamic level. But you just have to work quite painstakingly. The moment the players understand what the main melody is and what their component part of that melody is, then those things kind of solve themselves because they know what they’re listening to. 

From my experience of being a viola player you get a very valuable perspective from sitting right in the middle of the orchestra.  But it does mean that can get lost in the middle if you’re not quite sure if whether what you’re playing is a countermelody, or the main melody, or an accompaniment figure. Until you understand that, you really don’t know how to play a work.  And so it took a little more time than it might have done until clarity emerged, which I hope it did at the end. 

Afterwards, backstage the players were thrilled. It had been a challenging process and I don’t think anyone expected it would be as difficult as it was. But when you surmount the challenge and achieve it in the end, yes, I think everyone was really delighted! 

In spite of the difficulties presented by the orchestration, in the end – if you work at it – it does work! And with a figure as important as Joachim in 19th century music, as a performer, to have this extensive document of how he thought of the orchestra as a medium is wonderful. We know how Joachim played from what was written about him, but there is only a small amount of recorded material of him playing from the earliest years of sound recording. What we do have from him is this document of what he thought about the orchestra and that’s an invaluable resource.” (Geoffrey Paterson was speaking with Markson Pianos Composer in Residence, Lola Perrin)

Postscript: Kenneth Woods, who programmed the concert conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, adds:

"My interest in Joachim's orchestration of the Grand Duo came about through my friendship with the great composer John McCabe, whose loss last year continues to leave an open wound in the hearts of many a musician across the UK. John was a great devotee of this arrangement. As a pianist, he'd played the Duo many times and found it sonically problematic in spite of the fact that it was glorious music. It's unusual, if not impossible, for an arrangement of a work to improve on the original, but there are arrangements such as Ravel's orchestration of Pictures at and Exhibition which, even if they're not an actual improvement, offer an easier way into the piece for the listener. John also felt that as arranged by Joachim, it offered a wonderful addition to the limited number of mature orchestral works by Schubert, standing alongside the Unfinished and the Great C Major symphonies. Of course, many musicians, not least Robert Schumann, have suspected that Schubert always intended the work to be a symphony." (Kenneth Woods)

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Connect with Geoffrey Paterson

Geoffrey Paterson's current season includes multiple projects with the London Sinfonietta, Die Entführung aus dem Serail with Glyndebourne on Tour, The Nutcracker with the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen and Aarhus and his debut at the Holland Festival with a revival of The Corridor and The Cure. He studied at Cambridge University, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, took composition lessons with Alexander Goehr, participated in conducting masterclasses with Pierre Boulez, and trained as a repetiteur at the National Opera Studio. He won First Prize at the 2009 Leeds Conductors Competition, also winning the audience prize. He works regularly at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he was a member of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. 

Connect with Kenneth Woods

Principal Conductor - English Symphony Orchestra

Artistic Director - Colarado MahlerFest

#43 Andrew Downes, Composer & Cynthia Downes, Publisher

                                                                   Andrew Downes with wife Cynthia and
                                                                  daughters Anna and Paula at BFI for the launch 
                                                                  of his box set recordings of Symphonies 1 - 4

Interview with Andrew Downes (AD) 

and Cynthia Downes (CD)

CD My husband Andrew composes in his head all the time. He gets up very early and then at 8 o’clock he writes down all the ideas he’s been mulling over in his mind in the last twenty-four hours.  He works very methodically every day. It’s all there in his head, he spends two hours just to put it down.

AD I hear it pretty much exactly.  When I put it down, I try bits of it on the electronic keyboard, but it’s really just to check that something’s right, a balance or something like that.  Then I just put it straight into Sibelius 7. Then after the day’s session is over,  it just evolves into the next thing, usually overnight, and I wake up with new music in my head.

CD We have to be quiet while he’s actually writing it down; I always say the music pours out of him.  But for the rest of the time we’re not aware that he’s quietly composing in his head.

AD I do live in quite a quiet world. I don’t actually talk that much. I used to write it all out by hand, but the computer program makes it so much easier.  You can just produce the parts immediately from the score.   The best thing is that when you get to rehearsals you know that the parts are correct and you’re not going to spend a lot of expensive time putting things right.

CD He handwrote symphonies 1, 2 & 3 because they were written in the 1980s, before the Sibelius program came out. He used to pay students to write out parts for him.

AD I’ve just recorded and released my first four symphonies.  It all started in America with Stanislav Suchanek who was the second horn in the Czech Philharmonic at that time.  He had a sabbatical year as Professor of Horn at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  I went over there, I was commissioned to write a sonata for 8 horns, he played first horn.  He liked the music and took it back to Prague.  They recorded it and put it on the radio.  They’ve commissioned other pieces since, including a concerto for 4 horns and orchestra.  That was the first time I worked with the orchestra itself and we gradually developed this link.  Ondřej Vrabec is first horn player of the Czech Philharmonic and also an Associate Conductor.  He performed as Horn soloist in my concerto for Horn and Symphony Orchestra at Birmingham Town Hall, so that’s how it linked up.  He ended up conducting my symphonies.

I was able to commission the recording of my symphonies because I’d had compensation for a medical negligence case and was compensated for the things I could no longer do.

CD He broke his back and the hospital didn’t diagnose him until thirty hours later by which time it was too late, they didn’t immobilise him.  He was paralysed from the waist.

AD I’m unable now to travel to places like Prague or anywhere else, so we thought, rather than spend the money on things I could no longer do, it was better than spending the money actually making the recording.

CD I always was upset because when he had Symphony No. 1 first performed at the Cheltenham Festival the organ was at the back of the church, so in the amateur recording the organ just didn’t come over.  In the second performance the organ was loud and clear but the tape recorder didn’t work so we still didn’t have a good recording.  I’d always been bothered about that.  Our son-in-law, David Trippett, was very keen for Andrew to ask a good orchestra to record Andrew’s symphonic works and I thought that was a perfect opportunity to get that symphony heard, rather than it being stuck in a trunk.  What better orchestra than the Czech Philharmonic where Andrew already had contacts!

AD As soon as you get something on recording and people start listening to it, then you get other orchestras interested.  The Central England Ensemble will perform it in the Autumn as part of my 65^th birthday celebrations, they’re doing it in the Cathedral on September 3^rd.

CD We had recordings of the 2^nd and 3^rd, good performances but there some wrong things.  Composers are judged on their symphonies so it was an inevitable decision to use this money to record the first four symphonies.

 AD It took from end of February until May 2015.

CD The Czech Philharmonic recorded when they had a free morning or afternoon and they were incredibly efficient. It was all streamed through to us in Birmingham during the recording sessions taking place in Prague so we could hear exactly what it sounded like. 

AD We were listening live during the recording sessions so we could say if we heard anything wrong.
 

CD I was following it very closely on the score to for things that weren’t quite right, and it was very, very rare I have to say.

AD And I was listening and saying if I felt the interpretation felt right to me.  Very rarely did I have to say anything; between the conductor and the producer they were really getting it right.

CD There was a huge exchange of emails between Andrew and Ondřej who was making sure he understood how Andrew wanted different things done.  And getting hold of one of the instruments, the native American flute, was difficult.  We sent the one over that we’d bought in America.

AD Yes, and the first flautist in Prague actually learned the instrument specially, and he played it beautifully!

CD Symphony 3 has a lot of multi-time and Ondřej asked how to conduct it.  So we said just beat the crotchet beat and every player will just fit into it. 

AD It went very well.  Ondřej is very talented, there was absolutely no problem. Once you’ve written the piece it doesn’t really belong to you anymore.  It belongs to the players.  It was quite a relief in many ways when it was over, but we still had the documentary to make.

CD That was very stressful for Andrew. He couldn’t compose during that time.

AD I had a brain haemorrhage last year and since then I’ve been focussing on small scale pieces, songs …

CD He first of all wrote 7 Postludes for Piano, because he’d already written 7 Preludes for Piano. Then he went on to songs with small ensemble.  I think he will build up again.  He hasn’t lost any of his flair, perhaps just some of his confidence to start off with.  He’s written 109 works in total.   I’ve always loved music and although I did French and German at university, I learned violin from the age of 11 and have never stopped playing since.  I’ve run various musical groups and I support Andrew.  It works out well because there’s no rivalry between us.  I’m his publisher, personal assistant, promoter, I sell his music and CDs. 

AD Yes, we’ve retained control over all of the music. 

CD Faber are publishing one piece.  It’s very hard to get in with a publisher; we discovered that composers signed to publishing houses often couldn’t have a piece performed because the publisher would charge too much.  Often a group wanting to play a work has no money.  We’ve put all of Andrew’s music into the library of the Birmingham Conservatoire so groups can borrow the parts.  Or we can lend them out too, so players come directly to us to borrow the parts.  You can’t do that if you’re signed to a publisher.  Because Andrew had a really good job as Head of Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire and I’ve always worked in teaching, we’ve never been financially dependent on his composition. 

AD Imagine being dependent on PRS!  Before being a composer, I was a choral scholar at St John’s Cambridge, then I went to the Royal College and studied with Herbert Howells, then Lennox Berkeley. I was a counter tenor for a number of years and did the London circuit.  I ended up going to the Gottingen Handel Festival and singing the part of David with Fischer Dieskau in Handel’s Saul.  Fischer Dieskau was a very heavy smoker and completely besotted by his wife, Júlia Várady, who was soprano soloist in the production.  It was an incredible, nerve wracking, gorgeous experience, but it really didn’t do my nerves any good and I decided that my singing career should end on that high note. (Andrew Downes and Cynthia Downes were speaking with Markson Pianos Composer in Residence, Lola Perrin, 2016)

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Connect with Andrew Downes at http://www.andrewdownes.com/

Andrew Downes new box set CD release of Symphonies 1, 2, 3 & 4, including a DVD documentary about the making of the CD, was launched on Sunday April 17th at the National Film Theatre, South Bank Centre, London.  The launch was hosted by Laurence Lewis, Managing Director of Czech Music Direct.  The 2CD + DVD set can be purchased from Lynwood Music (the composer will sign any copies sold from this outlet), Czech Music Direct on 020 8346 0088 and the major retailers and online music sites. 

Saturday September 3rd 2016, 7pm
St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, UK
Andrew Downes 65th Birthday Concert

Symphony no 1 and other compositions
Paula Downes (soprano)
Duncan Honeybourne (piano, organ)
Central England Camerata (leader and solo violin Anna Downes)
Conductor Anthony Bradbury

 Listen to Andrew Downes' interview with Laurence Lewis of Czech Music Direct 

#42 Simon Markson: Managing Director of Markson Pianos and occasional actor

                               
                                                                       Simon Markson 

“About nine months ago Markson Pianos were approached by a film production company and asked if we could supply pianos for Florence Foster Jenkins, a film being made in the UK.  They were very specific.  There were six pianos in all.  They wanted a concert grand, two smaller grands and several uprights for specific location sets.  The film is based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins who was an American socialite from the 1920s and ‘30s.  They wanted a concert grand for the Carnegie Hall set and we put in a Steinway.  There were two hotel and apartment scenes where we put in a Bechstein grand and another Steinway grand.  The uprights were for various different scenes for a members of the cast playing the piano.  The pianos all had to be adapted to become silent so they could be played as ordinary pianos but could also be silenced where necessary.  At other times they would be played quite quietly.  Meryl Streep had to sing, and you always can’t sing without a piano accompaniment really, but the piano couldn’t be too loud for those scenes.  So there were lots of technical challenges.  We put a Steinway grand into Abbey Road studios with Meryl Streep coming along to record her singing, where she recorded in a separate sound booth to where the piano was situated. 

We had to deliver the pianos at short notice and also tune them at very short notice.  Logistically this was challenging to arrange.  The piano might be needed twenty steps up or twenty miles away.  Our tuner could sometimes be required to be there at 8.30am and stay there all day.  He was picked up either from his barge, or from our showroom, by a chauffeur.  I think it was both the most exciting and most challenging thing we’ve ever been asked to do, with last minute changes and technical demands of finding so many different pianos at the same time for one film.  We’ve done lots of different films where we might have been required to supply one piano at a time, like for ‘Room with a View’ when we supplied a beautiful ornate Bechstein grand piano. 

I was asked by the production company to do a viewing to see if one of our pianos could be taken to the first floor of a mansion outside London.   The film director turned up with crew in a jeep and I was asked to play the part of the piano tuner in the film.  I’ve done a lot of amateur dramatics and improvisation before, so I unhesitatingly said “yes!”.   The director said “we’ve found our piano tuner” and everyone cheered.  Then, followed a costume fitting and several months later I was called in for the filming, collected by car early in the morning and taken to Twickenham film studios. I expected that my character would to be seen in the background tuning a grand piano, so I was surprised to find myself on set with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.   It was only in the dressing room that I had been shown my script.  It became clear on set with various retakes that I would grow into the part of Charlie the piano tuner, and that my interaction with Meryl Streep was a comic one.

While on set I was asked my opinion on whether a large busk of Toscanini should remain on the piano or if it should be placed behind me.  I said it shouldn’t be placed on the piano as it would be difficult to tune the piano. I was also aware it would block most of the view of me in the film!  Hugh Grant wanted it on the piano but Meryl Streep agreed with me and the bust was placed behind. With the announcement of Toscanini’s arrival I was to be escorted off stage by Hugh Grant.  In one of the takes I slowed down thinking that this would increase my visibility in the film, and the director, Stephen Frears, shouted out “Don’t make a meal of it Simon”.

In the after-party Meryl Street was very interested to hear about our piano business.   I was told by the young editor that I had been cut in rather than cut out so I knew straight away that I wasn’t on the cutting room floor. It was a wonderful experience, they were very good humoured, supportive and encouraging.” (Simon Markson) 

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Florence Foster Jenkins is out in cinemas from May 6th

#41: Laurence Lewis: Director and Label Distributor

        Pressburger Klezmer Band


"I met James Brawn, who performs at Markson Pianos Concert Series, through his record label MSR Classics which I’ve been looking after for two or three years. It was actually quite a fluke how we met because initially I noticed the label was advertising a three disc box set by Czech composer Viktor Kalabis that I wanted so I contacted them and then ended up being their distributor. So I heard James Brawn through finding him on the same label, and now see him at many of his concerts.

I got into label distribution in a kind of roundabout way. My late wife Helen and I got involved in a project at Finchley Reform Synagogue to research one of their Torah scrolls from a small village near Prague that had been looted by the Nazis. We spent months researching and then went with an organised party to the Czech Republic.

We ended up making connections with a music dealer in Prague who we began buying material from. We put it on our website, and I gradually made contact with a couple of UK distributors. After around six months I got asked by the Slovakian label Hevhetia if we would be interested to distribute their records. The first record they sent was Miki Skuta playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and it got a double five star rating in BBC Music magazine. And that’s how we got started.

Over time other labels have come to us, or I’ve discovered them. I think I have around 12 or 14 labels, and each of them have extensive catalogues. I tend to concentrate on new releases rather than back catalogues.

As a daily routine I ship out orders to shops, or I deal with customers who come to my website, or to our Amazon store so I take care of the orders first. I have all the packaging here, together with the hundreds of CDs I’m currently handling, and I also have a franking machine. I have to personally take the discs to the sorting office which makes for a pleasant walk as part of my working day. I also write several newsletters to send out to my clients.

I’m currently busy trying to promote Hevhetia who have a really interesting catalogue of music I’d call contemporary in the sense of it could be jazz, it could be rock, it could be folk, it could be electronics, and because it’s Slovakian it’s not quite what you’d expect. And that’s what I like about it. For example, take the record by singer Hanka Gregušova; it appears to be a folk music disc but once you start investigating …. yes she has many famous Slovakian folk themes but it’s all been reinvented and reimagined for the twenty first century, so it comes with jazz, rock, even Reggae beats. She’s gathered around her on this disc some of the best Czech jazz musicians, and also has a cimbalom band. There’s a whole mix of contemporary sounds and there’s her voice in the middle – she’s a real singer! So I’m distributing this worldwide and also as a download; it’s available in over 200 online music stores.

And there’s another disc I’m currently working with by AMC Trio. The band appears to be a standard jazz combo of piano, bass and drums, but they long ago stopped playing traditional jazz pieces like the American Songbook because, as they told me, they didn’t feel that as Slovaks, they could really play American music properly. So now everything they play they write together as a collective, and instead of just being a kind of Slovakian slanted jazz, everything has a story, each piece has a kind of narrative. So if you look at the title track “Waiting for a wolf” (and there’s lots of wolves in Slovakia!), they’ve written this:

Have you ever spent a night, under the stars, deep in the Carpathian Mountains with only ancient trees for company?

And they’ve also composed one of the most heartbreaking jazz numbers I’ve ever heard; “She’s leaving for heaven”

For those who have lost someone close forever

And another of my current projects is the Pressburger Klezmer band who are the oldest klezmer band in Slovakia. Obviously during the war and afterward during the Communist period anything Jewish was not exactly encouraged, but since the Velvet Revolution when Slovakia came into being, there’s been a lot of interest in the Jewish culture. Pressburger have taken these famous old melodies and they’ve wrapped them up in a modern type of medium.

The Slovaks have become very creative. When the old Czechoslovakia broke apart I think the Czech’s got most of the culture and so the Slovaks have had to start again. In doing so they’ve not only been creating new things, as we see in the music of AMC Trio, but they’ve been going back and rediscovering some of their past, as we see in Pressburger Klezmer Band and also in Hanka Gregušova with her folk themes." (Laurence Lewis)

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Connect with Laurence Lewis

Czech Everything

#40: Ella Xunhuan Zhou: Concert Pianist

“Too few of us have social responsibilities, as musicians and as artists. I think some of us are afraid of taking social responsibility because we think this will affect our work as artists and the effort that we put into music or art. For me, I think it's the opposite because we are part of the planet and what we do inspires other people and affecting other people, it’s so important for us to realise that we have this precious opportunity to highlight some subjects out to our audiences and by doing this, it will make our work even better, our music even better.

I like the Russian pianist Andrei Gavrilov, very much. He’s such a wonderful pianist and a brave man For me, he’s the only one that I see who is actively on social media speaking the truth about some real social problems that unfortunately we are facing everyday but maybe feeling too lazy to change it or even acknowledge it. For me the way he does is very inspiring and audacious. I want to be more like this kind of artist. I can’t save the world but I can do my own part and at least influence to a certain degree.

I remember one of my friend told me a story about the history and development of musicians, during the ancient time, people were using music and instruments to speak about truth, about human feelings either beauty or ugliness through singing or playing melodies. In other words, we are a type of 'media'. In this case, I think it would be more meaningful to use this type 'media' as a platform to be more responsible and more engaged in this real world of full of realities. There are so many issues which are affecting us every second, every time we breathe. Things like discriminations; environmental pollutions, animal abuse etc. I can't just stand aside, I am not that kind of person who takes the glory but not returning anything, I think we need to give in order to receive. Many musicians have reached a certain level of fame they can already be influential but they are not. I don’t have that yet, but if I ever going to make it, I hope I can change things, even just a little.

I love animals, dogs, cats and recently I joined the Wolf Conservation Group. I try to do what I can. I spread the news about adopting animals and I report animal cruelty when I see it. I’m involved in stopping the dog meat festival in Yulin, China. One of my dream is to hope one day I can build my own charity for animals, so more disease can be treated and more life can be rescued.

My dog Nunu is a Cocker Spaniel, she’s almost nine years old now. She inspires me so much, every day. When I was very young I read Jane Goodall’s book about chimpanzees and became very aware of how animals and music go together. When I’m practising I get so much vibes from Nunu. I feel her energy and that she’s a really good listener to me.

We assume animals don’t understand, but I think we just don’t know them. I prefer to have the attitude that there are other beings on the planet apart from us who do have understanding. I find the subject very interesting. Glenn Gould said he only get along with dogs. And there are many other pianists close to animals, for example, Nelson Freire and Helene Grimaud. In general I think musicians tend to be very close to the nature.

I was born in Chongqing a city in the middle of China but when I was seven my parents moved to Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong. I studied piano because my Dad was a violinist. I’ve been studying music my whole life. I’ve had many great teachers. The most recent was Professor Antonio Bezzan. He studied in Budapest when he was very young and when I met him he was seventy four years old and an amazing pianist with a vision. I think as a teacher you have to have a very good vision about where you want to lead the student and to draw the bigger picture for the student. It’s not about telling what is right and what is wrong because you are already at that level where you can judge for yourself if something is right or not. But a good teacher can unlock something in your heart that you’ve been asking yourself for so many years … something that has been inside you that you can’t get to, and then suddenly, by one click, it’s opened. I remember I was playing the Mozart Fantasia in D Minor and, (I enjoy D Minor so much), also the Bach Chromatic Fantasy. Bezzan was standing there and out of nowhere he started to tell me the haunting character of Don Giovanni in such a way that Don Giovanni came in front of my eyes and he stayed there listening to me. So whenever I play this piece, I feel that the character really is there. And also he told me stories about how he’d studied with Frederich Gulda, about his time in Budapest and how he met all those pianists from the golden age, absolutely fascinating And you could see the light in his eyes and you could picture all of them alive, it was so wonderful. Sadly Bezzan passed away last year.

I’m currently working towards a competition I hope to reach the final round so I can play concerto. All my teachers have always encouraged me to play more Mozart because of my small hands, but in my heart I wanted to play Rachmaninov. I love to play concertos and also chamber music. Last year I did the Schubert Fantasy for 4-hands with a great artist in Brazil and everybody loved it. That was a wonderful moment for me because who doesn’t love Schubert?” (Ella Xunhuan Zhou)

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Ella Xunhuan Zhou performed at Markson Pianos Concert Series June 24th 2015 
Mozart Fantasia no. 3 in D minor K397
Chopin Preludes no. 1 to no. 12. op 28
Beethoven Sonata no 17 in D minor Op. 31
Rachmaninoff Etude-tableaux no.8 Op 39
Nikolai Kapustin Variations Op 41

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Bio

Born in China, Ella started to learn piano at age 4, gave her first public performance when she was 6 years old. At age 12, she was selected from one thousand candidates as a child prodigy to study piano and composition in Shenzhen Arts school, among her senior class mates there was Yundi LI ( the winner of the 14th international Chopin competition). During her studies, she participated in many competitions including the Parsons international piano competition(Hong Kong) at age 13 and has received 4th prize.

In year 2000, Ella immigrated to the UK. In Brighton, her talent was quickly discovered by Imogen Windsor and Anna Maria Tabor, under their guidance, she performed Mozart piano concerto in A Major with BHASVIC youth orchestra at age 15, at the same year her mentor Anna Maria Tabor encouraged her to also publish her composition work - The Tango Suite for string quartet. The premier was given by the soloists from Brighton Symphony Orchestra at the Brighton Friends Meeting House, the event was extremely successful and she was congratulated by the audiences and critics which has become a major motivation for her to carry on her music journey.

In year 2003, after receiving the best performance prize at the Brighton Springboard Festival, Ella moved to London and continued to study piano under Professor Roger Green from Trinity college of music, she gave recitals in many venues including the prestigious Southwark Cathedral, whilst she also pursued an undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Political Science at Keele University, at year 2006 she graduated with honours, in the following year 2007, she won 2nd prize at the Richmond Piano Festival Competition.

In 2010, she decided to move to Paris and continue her study with Professor Marian Rybicki in Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, since then, she played in various concerts across Europe including the legendary Salle Cortot. In 2011, she was invited by Prince Zur Lippe to perform her first debut at the Schloss Proschwitz in Germany.

Ella had the pleasure and honour to also participate in masterclasses given by Andrei Gavrilov and Maria Joao Pires. After Paris, in 2013 Ella moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil to continue her music career as a concert pianist and also to study with the latest Maestro Antonio Bezzan, she has performed in several festivals including the Mackenzie music series of Sao Paulo. She is now residing in Paris, Sao Paulo and London.

Connect with Ella  zhouxunhuan@yahoo.com

#39: Robert Stoodley and Linda Ang 'Piano A Deux': Piano Duo Concert Pianists

LA Ours is a unique journey as we met on a dating website to begin with, nothing to do with music!

RS It took about three weeks of emailing to find out whether she was a violinist, a cellist or a flautist. It turned out that she was a pianist.

LA I was certainly not looking for a musician, let alone a pianist to marry! However, we married in 2008 and in 2010 we started 'Piano a Deux'.

RS The transition from being a soloist to working in a duo takes time. This is where you realise you are no longer sitting in the middle of the piano, that you are always sitting at an awkward angle, and you’re limited to your part of the keyboard, which is either the top or the bottom. Then you find that there’s a lot of clashing of hands, you scratch each other with your finger nails, and you bump into each other a lot. Sometimes composers write the same note for both players. You might also disagree about how phrases should be played or how the music is to be shaped.

LA If you listen to orchestras or ensembles, many play in straight time, that’s playing metronomically. Many ensembles, we find, play like that. We wondered why, until we realised that it makes it much easier. Even with just 2 people, using subtleties of rhythm, or rubato as it is called, makes playing together much more demanding.

RS I think playing in a piano duo is really about honest and open communication. Both have to be able to say without offence if something is not working. If issues are not sorted out, they can fester and affect the eventual result. Conflict resolution is constantly essential. In fact, having a therapist on hand would be fantastic.

LA It’s Wimbledon season at the moment. Solo and duo playing are like playing Singles and Doubles: totally different ball games, with different mindsets and different requirements of skills.

RS With any kind of chamber music, you have to listen like a hawk. If you imagine playing a Chopin Nocturne, and then imagine that one person is playing the melody and the other person is playing the accompaniment … or even a waltz and think “I’m going to put some rubato in” … it becomes a very different and difficult thing for two people to accomplish.

RS A soloist has one brain working two hands. With a piano duo it’s two brains working four hands, hence our motto: 'Four Hands One Heart'!

LA We don’t always take the same part; sometimes I play Primo, at other times Robert does.

RS We’ve been on a bit of a journey with this because Linda assumed I would take the top part as I've got bigger hands and bigger shoulders. But then people and also our agents said that Linda can’t be seen when I play Primo. They want to see her and the dresses she wears ...

LA We have realised that the visual impact of a concert is really important too.

RS When we begin a new work we sight-read through it and then practise it separately on two different pianos for some time. Issues arise when we come back together and work out how to find one interpretation from the different ways in which we’ve come to hear the piece. That’s when conflict kicks in again.

LA I think of Maria Callas at this point. She went to every single orchestra rehearsal and said “If you want to know how to act, you listen to the orchestral part, it’s all there”. So it’s really important to know all the parts. Sometimes we actually swap roles so we know the other part intimately – that’s the ideal.

RS We’re interested in finding neglected composers and playing their music, especially when it's really good. We've found the French composer Georges Onslow, who we discovered in a dusty drawer in a music library.  During his lifetime, was as celebrated all over Europe as Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn and admired by all of those, but interest in his music faded when he died. His family didn’t take on the publication or organisation of it, and so it just disappeared from public view. We've just recorded a CD which includes his Op. 7 sonata and his six solo pieces.

LA We also play the standard repertoire, and a lot of our own arrangements, for example 'An American in Paris' , 'Carmen Fantasy', 'Tea For Two' and Liszt’s 'Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2'' where we've added our own cadenzas . Also 'Stranger in Paradise' from Kismet and ' You Are My Heart’s Delight' by Franz Lehar.  There’s also Johann Strauss' ' Voices of Spring'. Very often we take tunes from operetta or music theatre and rearrange them. I used to play these arrangements on my own, and when Robert turned up he added another tier, so we've called one piece: 'Gershwin In Tiers' We’ve recently recorded six Poulenc songs which I arranged and turned into a suite for piano duo: 'Songs of Love & War'.

RS We also add pianistic gestures and write big virtuosic finishes which always work well in concert.

*****

Piano À Deux perform at Markson Pianos Concert Series 

Wednesday 29th July at 7 p.m
St Mary Magdalene Church, Munster Square, London NW1 3PT
Admission is free, though contributions will be welcome at the end

'Carmen Carnival': Bizet arr Ang/Stoodley

 E minor Sonata, Op. 7: George Onslow

'L'Amour et La Guerre': six Poulenc songs arr Ang/Stoodley (selection)

 'An American in Paris': Gershwin arr Ang/Stoodley

*****

Connect with Linda and Robert 

BIO 
Since its creation in 2010, “Piano À Deux” with its 'Four Hands One Heart' approach is redefining the piano duo experience for audiences worldwide. Robert & Linda have been wowing audiences in Hungary, Italy, Germany, Singapore, in the UK and on cruise ships with their charisma, comedy and virtuosity set in their original musical arrangements. They met not through music, but at a dating website, and married in 2008. Apart from their arrangements they also play the standard repertoire and music by neglected composers like Georges Onslow. They have just recorded his Op 7 Duo Sonata and six solo pieces on their second CD, which includes music by Debussy and songs by Poulenc (arr Linda Ang) Through their first CD: “Strictly Not Bach” released in 2011, Piano À Deux, with their audiences, have raised £2,000 for WorldVision and other charities. Their 2012 appearance on UK’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, where one of the judges Amanda Holden said, “I’m sure that the Royal Family would love this!” has earned them the epithet: 'Darlings of ITV' from producer Chris Gidney.

ROBERT STOODLEY Robert studied the piano with Dorothea Law, (student of Paul Baumgartner and Alfred Brendel), and is a linguist and songwriter. Some of Robert’s songs have been published and sung throughout the world. Many have been recorded, the most recent recording being “St. Michael-le-Belfrey--the Vinyl Years”. Robert also gained the Premier Prix at the Conservatoire de Lyon (France), has broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and given recitals and concerto performances throughout the UK. 

LINDA ANG STOODLEY Singapore born pianist Linda, B.Mus. (Edinburgh) won many awards like the RoyalOverseas League Accompanist’s Prize, and was with the Guildhall String Ensemble when they won the Internationales Jeunesses Musicales Competition in Belgrade. Linda has performed in the UK, Europe, Mauritius and Singapore; on Dutch and Mauritius television, Radio Scotland, Radio Oxford, Radio 3, live on Classic FM and Premier Radio and has recorded with several artistes and has seven CDs of her own. Linda was featured in Singapore’s “Straits Times” and Singapore Airlines’ In-flight Magazine and was cover girl for “Woman Alive” magazine.

#38 Nada Kolundzija: Concert Pianist

"I liked Yugoslavia. It was my country and I had a lot of friends everywhere.   Every year I played solo concerts, and also concerts with my violinist brother, in the former Yugoslav Republics. The whole country was my home.  

Then came  the Yugoslav Wars in the period between 1991 and 1999.  I was completely confused.  We couldn't travel anywhere to play. Professionally, it was a disaster. Living also became difficult because of financial and political sanctions against Serbia.  And then in 1992, everything culminated with bombing of Serbia and Montenegro for more than two months.  It was too much for all of us.

At that time I left Belgrade for a village nearby. And actually, I didn't have any wish to work and to play piano, because my feeling for my country had gone.  I know many other people who had a different approach, and they started working more than they had before the war started.  But I couldn't.

I was really lost because I lost my job that was essential for my life.  I became a gardener.  I grew vegetables, there were so many that I ended up giving a lot of them away.  I was a really successful gardener. I enjoyed that job and I still garden as a hobby now in Belgrade.  I lost my identity during those years...things really fell apart for me.  But, when you are in something, you don’t feel how bad it actually might be.  Humans are flexible and we couldn't survive without this flexibility.

In the lead up before the bombing started I was working in Belgrade, at the Faculty of Music. It was a very hard time.  Every day we were advised to stay at home. We never knew when we would hear alarm and the voice over the megaphone that alerted us that the bombing would start and also when the bombing was over.  I will never forget that voice, or the sound of siren.   But of course many people still did go outside anyway, even though we were supposed to stay inside.  It was becoming difficult to manage so many things and so our work became very difficult to do.

Before things changed, and then after things settled down, a strong impulse for music came to me. I started to practice a lot. I played Classical repertoire with my brother Jovan Kolundzija, who is a great violinist and I continued with my love in contemporary music; Schoenberg, Xenakis, Cage, Messaien, Kagel… all those very famous names, classics of 20th Century, and many new composers too. From the time I was in Middle School, I was always very interested in this kind of music, a new music. So, when I returned to Belgrade I took it up again. And, I began to get my identity back when I started to play.   Nowadays I’m very happy, I work a lot, with pleasure, often long into the night.  I feel passion for my work. That’s my life. I am discovering new scores and new music, listening a lot and when I find something that is for me I want to play this so much! 

Right now, I’ve made something new.  I’m now at the point in my career where I've prepared a small concert anthology of music for piano, and from that I've chosen three concert programmes.  So I’m busy preparing all the new repertoire for these new concerts.  The three concerts are one month apart for three months. Such a big job. But so nice!

After that I want to choose the best pieces and play one more concert in a Synagogue in Novi Sad; it’s a great place to play and record, play in more places and make CDs with nice book about composers and with the pieces." (Nada Kolundzija)

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Short bio

Belgrade-based Nada Kolundzija is an internationally renowned concert pianist and Serbia's most prominent performer and passionate promoter of contemporary music.  Over a career spanning more than four decades, Ms. Kolundzija has performed as a soloist and as a chamber music collaborator in countless concerts at home and abroad, been featured as a leading national artist on Serbian radio and television broadcasts, and won national and international awards and recognition for her artistic achievements in classical and contemporary music.

Listen to Nada Kolundzija play Louis Andriessen Image de Moreau - Tocatta  for Piano (1)

Connect with Nada Kolundzija