#46 Jenni Roditi: Composer, conductor, pianist

I originally trained in piano and composition … Everything I do pours into my teaching and now, for the first time, into my conducting too …

“I conduct two choirs; a professional choir TIC - The Improvisers Choir and a community choir TOC - The Open Choir. The project is TIC TOC SING. TIC singers come from a wide variety of genres. We have pop singers with opera singers, avant-garde with jazz, folk and experimental so we’ve got a bend-not-blend aesthetic. Some are composers, while others are working in film and are in musical theatre. So the idea was to have a completely mixed genre, mixed sound choir.

The choirs kind of leapt out of my Vocal Tai Chi workshops that I’ve been running for a long time where there’s a lot of improvising behind closed doors. Both choirs work with improvisation. I conduct using a system of signals that form the music in the moment. This gives a lot of freedom to the individual singer to come up with their own ideas. I’m taking on the meta-structure …..by which I mean the overall shape of the piece. So I can control the flow of the music by encouraging one element to grow and another to fade for example. I can start sections and stop sections and that means knowing what to encourage and when to change. Those are really compositional decisions - but not made with any time to reflect, as one does sitting at a desk, but in the moment with no looking back. So whatever is happening my task is the make it work… as Miles Davis said -'if you play a wrong note - play it again'.  It is a co- creative process because I am responding to what the choir members are creating themselves. It's a beautifully porous situation. 

The hand signals are a simple set of traffic lights with various semaphore gestures that indicate what kind of musical clay to work with. They say whether you copy others, or if you step forward to solo, or if you are creating a repeating pattern, or if you are harmonising something that’s there, or giving an undercurrent of rhythm, or if you are suggesting harmony with sustained notes … I have different signals for each of these simple building blocks. Pitch is already there in the room, once someone sings a note then you create a mode around that note. Sometimes there may be two modes going on, I’m interested in the bitonality, so can be perfect, sometimes it may be more jazzy, sometimes it may be more complex or dissonant in colours and tones. There isn’t really harmonic progression in the old sense, it’s more like the Balinese - Javanese tradition of repetition and concentration on timbre and colour and working with atmospheres.

My own improvised singing is like a vocal form of Tai Chi… I call it Moving Voice Between Heaven and Earth. It’s a synthesis of tai chi, breath practice, centring and grounding with the present moment sounding and improvising voice, the creative voice. It draws on different practices I’ve studied including therapeutic work, Indian ragas and Extended Vocal Technique. I’m also influenced by indigenous sounds; earth bound voice traditions, Inuit, Bulgarian vocal tradition and so on.

I originally trained in piano and composition at Guildhall and have been writing for many different instrumental groupings including three operas, choral work, and piano music, such as my forty-minute piano duo, ‘Between the Octaves’, exploring essential elements of piano music in seven movements: initiate, spatial, line, layer, rotate, pronounce and pulsate. So, TIC TOC SING is drawing on my work in contemporary music composition all the time. Everything I do pours into my teaching and now, for the first time, into my conducting too and the way that I embody my work and (hopefully) inspire students to practice with me. 

After the first TOC concert someone said it was looking at a living organism, or like being in the presence of a sort of animal that was expressing itself giving the sense of an untamed energy. Another audience member said she had expected it to all sound samey but there was a lot of variety and a real sense of journey for her. There had been nerves to start with but afterwards there was a vibrant and celebratory atmosphere!” (Jenni Roditi was speaking with Markson Pianos Composer in Residence Lola Perrin)

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On Friday 10th June at the Crouch End Festival opening night at the Grade 2 listed Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, Jenni Roditi will be conducting two concerts in one. First, the community choir TOC - The Open Choir - will perform in the Crush Hall, a marble art deco with wonderful resonant acoustic. Then the audience will process downstairs to the Supper Room where the professional choir TIC - The Improvisers Choir - will perform.

June 10th 7.30pm Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre
Tickets £3.30 in advance and £5 on the door for TIC. TOC is free entry
June 16th 7pm – 9pm Introduction to Vocal Tai Chi at the Loft
Booking via admin@vocaltaichi.com £6 on the door.
June 18th 11am – 4pm. TIC TIC SING

Public workshop in Hornsey Town Hall Supper Room with members of both choirs present.

Connect with Jenni Roditi
http://www.tictocsing.com
http://www.vocaltaichi.com
http://www.jenni-roditi.com

Jenni Roditi FRSA GGSM, MMus VMTR is an associate of the Institute of Composing and board director of BASCA. She is a composer, vocalist, pianist and conductor of two improvisation choirs. She founded Vocal Tai Chi in 2012. She is currently working on refinements of her piece ‘Between the Octaves’ for piano duo and is looking for a venue and open minded players to present the premiere of this work….

#45 Marina Petrov: Concert Pianist, Educator & Co-founder of ATGPMF

The first thing I try to teach my students is the love and understanding of music ...  Many of my students stay with me for a very long time ... this is something that can be explored for decades

"I consider myself an idealist when it comes to teaching music.  I give myself completely as a person and as a musician.  The first thing I try to teach my students is the love and understanding of music,of understanding different styles.  Many of my students stay with me for a very long time because this is a process for learning for the rest of your life and because music is something that can be explored for decades.  It never ends.  When students fall in love with music, as I do through the piano, then we learn how to create.  So creativity is an important part of what we do together and this is why students who stick with me for a long period of time produce such a level of playing.

My piano class consist of students of all ages and levels, from children as young as five years old, to amateurs, to diploma students, to professional pianists. With the young beginner, I use a combination of books.  I try to get them to sing with the piano, sing without the piano, to make little phrases.  I don’t obsess about the reading of the notes.  I repeat the same things over and again; singing up the scale together, “A B C D E” and other methods so they connect with the keys.  It’s a very gradual process of learning.  I say to them, “If you play the same thing at home over and over, and you look at the music and you also look down at the keyboard, it will gradually just come”.  The progress depends on the child and how much they practice.  I have a rule for children that they must practice 20 minutes per day, and if they don’t do it, they have to make it up.  Some do and some don’t!

During the lesson, at some point I stop the piece and ask them to name the notes they’re playing.  I always teach them if they don’t recognise the written note, they have to work it out.  I don’t want them to feel frightened that they don’t know the names, I teach them that they simply need to stop to work it out.

Teaching children is not an easy task and it requires much patience.  The brain in the child is small and they are leaning several simultaneous processes; to play (mechanical finger movement), to have the co-ordination, to read music, to look up and down … many different processes combine when they are learning.  This is demanding on the child and if you try everything at once it won’t happen.  So we build very gradually and steadily.

Theory is an important part of learning to play.  Even during the shorter lessons, I find a way to integrate theory, I’m doing it all at once so it’s a combined process. As students progress I encourage them to memorise; musical memory is so important. And when they know the work from memory, they can look down and learn about the space. But of course I have to make sure that their reading skills continue to improve. I do this by changing pieces regularly and integrating sightreading.

And then when they become teenagers and go through many changes that are hormonal, for example, it can become a different story.  Sometimes a student will have taken many grades but then during teenage years become unsure, and that can worry me.  So, to keep them engaged I try to encourage my teenage students to explore non classical music and often we switch to a completely different style, either something trendy, or something they’ve heard and want to learn - and that’s how I keep them going.” (Marina Petrov was speaking with Markson Pianos Composer in Residence Lola Perrin)

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Marina Petrov was born in Kiev and raised in Belgrade.  At the age of 18 she won an award to study at the Moscow Conservatoire. She is based in London where she has also established a unique piano teaching practice.  Connect with Marina

Marina Petrov and Maya Jordan are the founders of Around the Globe Piano Music Festival, for all ages and standards, next taking place in London November 20th, 2016

#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