Kings Place Festival 2011
10-12 September 2011

These successful annual weekend festivals (with wide-ranging Classical, Jazz, Folk and world music concerts etc) are informal shop-windows to help boost attendances at Kings Place, London's newest major concerts venue.

Attendances at Kings Place have remained variable, and during Sunday's Chopin/Schumann recital William Howard [below L] urged his (small) audience to buy tickets for his next one to follow; contemporary music by mainly British composers. Whether that had any effect we'll never know; the audience for that indeed attractive and unfrightening programme was even smaller.

I found Howard's Chopin Impromptu & Ballade unremarkable - I had been immersing myself for a week in Cyprien Katsaris's Chopin Master Classes in Shanghai, and his wonderful Chopin Memorial recital filmed at Carnegie Hall, both those revelatory...

Howard's second recital was in fact far the better of his two; good to hear again Judith Weir's witty exploration of keybord touch The Art of Touching the Keyboard (1954) and Piers Hellawell's Piani, Latebre. Seven of Skempton's eleven minimal miniatures were too many for me. Most of the composers featured were present and took their bows - an exception was the Czech Pavel Novak [L], whose rich, expansive Preludes & Fugues I had admired on CD.

The previous evening Ivana Gavric had confirmed good impressions from CD with performances of Janacek chamber music and his Sonata 1.X.1905. Assisted by members of Aurora Orchestra, Thomas Gould and Oliver Coates impressed in the violin sonata and Pohadka, as did Timothy Orpen (clarinet) in his movement of the oddly-scored Piano Concertino. During the interval, Aurora's brass and tympanist entertained us upstairs in the cafe area with the fanfare from Janacek's Sinfonietta.

Nicholas Mulroy's robust tenor was ideal for the major cycle of 22 songs about the young man who went off with the Gypsies. He sang them in the original Czech, and enjoyed it "as music", but it was a disaster for some of the many who didn't know the cycle nor the language...

Kings Place Hall One had once again opted for the fashionable darkness, making it impossible to follow with the programme with its good notes and English words. (What hope for critics who might like to follow scores in concerts?)

Photos were discouraged in the auditorium (which suffers in quiet passages from obtrusive ambient noise from lights or air conditioning ?) so I offer illustrations from the foyer activities during the weekend.

Peter Grahame Woolf