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Simon Wallfisch - 'cello & baritone

Rhodri Clarke - piano

Wednesday 29th March 2007  8.00pm
St Mary's Parish Church, Church Road, Barnes
 

The name Wallfisch has been an honoured one in Britain’s musical life, since Anita Lasker, together with her sister Renate arrived in this country in March 1946 as ex-imates of  Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1943 and from October 1944 Belsen. Anita owes her life to the fact that she was a cellist. Word reached Alma Rose the director of the famous Lagerkapelle whose duties included playing at the main gate as the thousands of prisoners who worked outside the camp left in the morning and returned, if they were lucky, in the evening. She was the only cellist in the orchestra.

Subsequently Anita married the distinguished pianist Peter Wallfisch and helped to found the English Chamber Orchestra in which she played for many years. One of their children is the internationally known Rafael, also a cellist. His wife Elizabeth is the internationally known violinist. Of their children, Benjamin is a conductor and composer, Simon a baritone and of course, cellist.

It was Simon, who together with Rhodri Clarke piano, were the artists at Barnes Music Society’s latest concert at St Mary’s Church (29 March). Both have successful post-graduate careers and mirror the Society’s aim to concentrate on young musicians on the brink of stardom, They gave a strongly commited performance of Schumann’s song cycle Leiderkreis, Op.39 to texts by Joseph von Eichendorff. Simon has a natural stage presence, youthful enthusiasm and as one would expect from someone who lives in Berlin, intense feeling for the “unfathomable” quality at the dark centre of both composer and poet.

Rhodri Clarke followed with three solo pieces from Liszt’s Book 1 Years of Pilgrimage. These colourful portraits - The Chapel of William Tell, Storm and The Bells of Geneva call for exceptional virtuoso technique and Rhodri met these on every count, impassioned in The Storm and evocative in Geneva Bells.

Wallfisch showed his solo cello mettle in the first of Bach’s Suites BWV.1007, a masterpiece of texture, structure, rhythm, form and lightness of colour, and the final piece, Prokofiev’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op.119 written for the young Mstislav Rostropovich. Composer and cellist were close friends and given the artistic strictures of the time the Sonata is orthodox and largely optimistic in tone. Both artists had the full measure of this spiky, cheeky work.

Peter Brown.

Rosendale String Quartet

Wednesday 19th January 2005  8.00pm
Holy Trinity Church, Castelnau, Barnes
 

Anna Kirkpatrick - Violin

Sarah Rimer - Violin

Anne Trygstad - Viola

Tim Wells - 'Cello

One of the principal aims of Barnes Music Society’s live concerts programme is to give young musicians a platform on which to hone their artistic personalities. One such, the Rosendale String Quartet gave last Wednesday’s (19 Jan) concert at Holy Trinity Church, Castelnau special meaning.

The Rosendale (Anna Kirkpatrick, Sarah Rimer, Anne Trygstad and Tim Wells) came together when the members were studying at the Royal College of Music in 2000, where they won the Susan Connell Chamber Music Prize, and in 2001 became quartet in residence for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts Project. They have performed with local composer and TV presenter Howard Goodall and were asked by Faber Music to give the first performance of a hitherto unpublished Vaughan Williams quartet.

The benefits of performing in a intimate setting such as Holy Trinity Church showed in their opening work, Haydn’s Quartet in F, Op.77 No.2, his last in the genre. Still relatively neglected, the culmination of a 44 year career it is a masterpiece as perfect in form and inspiration, as brilliantly original as any of Haydn’s popular `named’ quartets, or even those by Beethoven, Schubert or Mozart. Haydn places the Minuet second, but already it’s really a Scherzo, dramatically played by the Rosendale, while they reached their peak in the deeply expressive Andante. Haydn may have been physically exhausted when he wrote this music but his creative imagination was brighter and more powerful than ever.

In a nice compliment to their alma mater and a famous old boy, the Rosendale’s next turned to Benjamin Britten’s Three Divertimenti for string quartet, written in 1936 while studying at the College with Frank Bridge. Intended as a musical portrait of school friends each movement – March, Waltz and Burlesque has its own distinct character which the Rosendale’s captured to perfection in the lilting Waltz and the outgoing, boisterous Burlesque which gradually speeded up like a Rossini overture.

Its outrageous technical demands of pizzicato, glissandi, harmonics and double stopping clearly had the audience on the edge of their pews.

After the interval came the best known piece of the programme, Borodin’s Second Quartet, famous for its beautiful Nocturne and transformed into a love song for the musical Kismet. Like Haydn, Borodin placed his scherzo second, a fleet moto perpetuo, typical of the generally light and cheerful nature of the work, believed to have been written to celebrate the composer’s 20^th wedding anniversary. The alternately wistful and driving finale was exquisitely phrased and delighted the audience so much they were rewarded with an encore Tango in C by the internationally known Swedish cellist Mats Lindstrom.

Peter Brown    

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Grace Francis

Thursday 10th March 2005  8.00pm
St Mary's Church, Church Road, Barnes
 

Grace Francis is not a well known name on the international concert hall circuit and once again Barnes Music Society has led the field in finding and encouraging an exceptionally talented young artist.

 Born in East London, her parents are not musicians and it was her school which nurtured and furthered her natural talent and put her in touch with good teachers. In time this led to a place at the Yehudi Menuhin School before studying with Irina Zaritskaya at the Royal College of Music, where she was awarded the Chappell Gold Medal, the highest award for a pianist. She subsequently received a Wingate Scholarship to continue her studies with the distinguished Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo with whom she is still studying.

Grace has given many concerts in Britain: at the Purcell Room and Wigmore Hall for the Kirckman Concert Society; at the Barbican; St Martin-in-the-Fields; and at St James’ Piccadilly. She has also broadcast for BBC Radio 3. Her repertoire is wide-ranging and varied but she is clearly happiest with the Romantic composers of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

This was demonstrated by her varied and consistently interesting programme of Schumann, Bartok, Chopin and Brahms. Beginning with the rip-roaring Faschingsschwank aus Wien she brought out the tenderness of the Romanze and the Scherzino’s puckish humour before plunging headlong into the Finale.

Grace’s slight figure and modest demeanour do not at first glance excite much enthusiasm for her ability to cope with the challenging repertoire she has set herself, but the moment she lays her slender fingers on the keys she is a changed personality, with an evident passion for her instrument and repertoire. Bartok’s Hungarian folksong based Suite Op.14 gave her ample opportunity to vary her approach from the quixotic lightening Scherzo to the tranquil Sostenuto, a moment of sustained tranquillity reminiscent of Debussy.

Her tumultuous performance of Chopin’s Scherzo No.1 brought the first half to close giving audible pleasure to the attentive Barnes audience.

The second half was devoted to a single work, Brahms’ massive five movement Sonata No.3 in F minor, Op.5. Appropriately for a young pianist, one of Brahms biographers considered it to be a self-portrait of the composer as a young man. Each movement demonstrates in a different way what the distinguished commentator Donald Francis Tovey considered to be `a mastery of classical technique unknown since Beethoven’. Grace Francis duly met these challenges with sensitive graduations of tone in the nocturnal Andante Espressivo and retrospective Intermezzo before bringing the `fantastic’ Finale finish to a triumphant ending with a flourish that brought the audience to its feet.

 Another stupendous first for Barnes!

Peter Brown 

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Krysia Osostowicz & Simon Crawford-Phillips

Thursday 28th April 2005  8.00pm
St Mary's Church, Church Road, Barnes
 

There was a strong international feel to Barnes Music Society’s 28 April concert at St Mary’s Church with music from Austrian, Scottish, French, Polish and German composers played by the violin and piano duo Krysia Osostowicz and Simon Crawford-Phillips.

After a classical opening with Schubert’s Sonatina No.1 in D, D.384, James MacMillan’s brief After the Tryst injected a typically gutsy note with a miniature fantasy based on a poem by the Scottish writer William Souter written in the Scots tongue, which is an erotic account of a nocturnal assignation, which MacMillan feels is a reflection of the poem’s intimacy and emotion.

It was left to Ravel’s glittering Sonata in G to restore our senses and Osostowicz and  Crawford-Phillips, who had not played together before, produced jointly expressive playing in music inspired by the folk music of the Basque region in which Ravel grew up. The perky jazz influenced Blues movement with its flamboyant pizzicato opening and sensuous main theme was superbly done and Osostowicz’s flashing bow dealt with the final Perpetuum Mobile in impetuous style.

The artists played tribute to the violinist’s countryman with the water influenced Three Myths by Karol Szymanowski. The opening Fountain of Arethusa is relatively well known but it was a treat to hear the unfamiliar Narcissus and Pan and the Dryads. All three movements are full of tantalisingly different effects from the still and languid to the playful or violent.

Water played a part in the final work, Brahms’ Sonata No.1 in G, Op.73 whose last movement quotes the composer’s song Regenlied. This sonata has an unbearably yearning opening leading to a lyrical Adagio and throughout these two exceedingly accomplished musicians did not fail to reach the heights of the finest playing.

 Peter Brown

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