Conway Hall Sunday Concerts 2013

Britten, Brahms, Faure, Schubert, Sellars

Schubert Standchen, Gebet and Marches Caracteristiques
Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes etc

English Chamber Choir/Guy Protheroe
with pianists Simon Callaghan and Hiro Takenouchi

26 May 2013

It was good to have an opportunity to hear Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes complete, but this distinguished recording choir was not in good form for this "end of term" concert.

The programme note reminds us that the Waltzes were intended for domestic use, and for a quartet of singeers, not full choir.

The English Chamber Choir has a distinguished discography, with important reccordings of such a Jonathan Harvey and Xenakis.

Peter Grahame Woolf

Haydn, Britten & Franck

Conway Hall 12 May 2013, 6.30 pm

A fine evening, with the Edinburgh Quartet displaying great refinement in one of Haydn's most popular quartets, its joke coming at the very end.

Britten's first is probably the least well known of his three (there are also some juvenilia) and it was good to have already heard it twice in this centenary year.

The Franck quintet is what we'd really come for, and Simon Callaghan was assured and tireless in its formidable piano part, a plethora of noted and no time to rest. A rewarding piece, but one not to hear too often.

Peter Grahame Woolf

Hear Callaghan with his frequent colleague Hiro Takenouchi providing a piano duet accompaniment for Guy Protheroe's English Chamber Choir at the special last concert of this series, May 26th.

Ravel’s Shéhérazade and songs by Fauré, Poulenc and Rachmaninoff.
Hiro Takenouchi & Simon Callaghan piano duet
Ilona Domnich soprano
13 January 2013

A marvellous concert for the new year reunion of Conway Hall's Sunday loyalists.

Some regulars there might though have been wary of a song recital, as the audience was only of moderate size.

Ilona Domnichi is a fine soprano with a lovely voice and platform manner, "plucked from St Petersberg to the Royal College of Music in London", and a thorough grasp of French and Russian. It was good to hear Shéhérazade in its piano accompaniment version.

English texts supplied made it easy to follow the French songs - less so for those in Russian. She finished, after the second group of piano duets, with Rachmaninoff's well-known wordless Vocalise [see R, with Kathron Sturrock, who was at Conway Hall for this concert].

Punctuating the songs with two lovely piano duet suites by Ravel & Fauré was a brilliant notion, and it was good to see the friends Callaghan & Takenouchi (they often serve as page-turners for one or other at these concerts) in partnership at the keyboard.

Peter Grahame Woolf