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Roderick Chadwick

Who or what inspired you to take up the piano, and make it your career?

To take it up: I did so twice, aged 5 and 7 with a short break in between. Second time around I was intrigued by a harpsichord at my eventual teacher Heather Slade-Lipkin’s house (her son was a school friend). She suggested a lesson, and carried on teaching me brilliantly for ten years.

To make it a career: Chetham’s School – the people there, and the place.

Who or what were the most important influences on your musical life and career?

Early ones – my mother, who sent me to Chetham’s when she was receiving a lot of advice not to. Plus Olivier Messiaen, whom I was lucky enough to see just once in Huddersfield in 1989. Tim Horton played Messiaen’s Ile de Feu 1 to me when we were 10(!), and I immediately thought “This is what a piano is made to do”. Thanks Tim. Daniel Harding woke me up to the fact that other music was also good.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

Playing Beethoven in Tokyo. Starting out.

Which performance/recordings are you most proud of?

Performances: Stockhausen Mantra and Laurence Crane Ethiopian Distance Runners, both in the last few years at King’s Place 2.

Which particular works do you think you play best?

Messiaen ‘Le Traquet Stapazin’. Tippett’s song ‘Compassion’. You said “think”.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

New things appear all the time, not really on a seasonal basis

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

At the moment, Kettle’s Yard Cambridge. The audience.

Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?

To perform: the music that, while you’re performing it, makes the rest of life seem like gaps in between performances: Violin Sonatas by Ravel, Walton, Prokofiev 1st, Messiaen Quatour. To listen: many! First movement of Mahler 7 (for the long melody in the middle) is a major indulgence. Britten Hymn to St Cecilia.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

The first that spring to mind: hearing Michael Finnissy play English Country Tunes in 2006. A very fine performance of Messiaen La Transfiguration (2008) where I sat behind George Benjamin and saw how moved he seemed by his teacher’s music.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Accentuate the positives. Smell the roses. Artistry is not necessarily individuality. Perform as much as you can.

You will be performing Jim Aitchison’s new work ‘Portraits for a Study’. Tell us a little more about the particular challenges and excitements of this collaboration and the unusual circumstances of its performance using Yamaha’s Disklavier piano?

It’s often beautiful and sometimes quite awesome music, and I’m thrilled to be giving the first performance. Jim, I think, spent a long time considering how to respond to Richter before starting to write, and it’s proof that some profound links can be found between music and the visual arts if you do that.

I’ll play a Disklavier in Falmouth, which will be transmitted by internet to various venues in London (Goldsmith’s, Chappell’s, RAM) and the audiences there will be treated to an apparently playerless piano. The challenge is having the confidence that more subtle aspects of playing are going to be reproduced hundreds of miles away – though it seems to have worked in test runs.

Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?

Somewhere green in Britain or France

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I just got married to Jane, which was pretty happy

What is your present state of mind?

Hurried/content

Roderick Chadwick will premiere Jim Aitchison’s Portraits for a Study at the University of Falmouth on Saturday 22nd February, with a simultaneous performance via Yamaha Disklavier technology at the Royal Academy of Music, Yamaha London and Goldsmith’s College.

Jim Aitchison: Inspired by Richter

Roderick Chadwick was born in Manchester and educated at Chetham’s School of Music, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Hamish Milne. He was awarded the Mosco Carner Fellowship in 1997-8 and joined the academic staff of the Academy in 1999. Since then he has combined his teaching and research interests with an active career as a soloist and chamber musician, particularly in the field of contemporary music. He has performed at many of Britain’s most prominent venues including the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, the Wigmore Hall, St John’s Smith Square, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where he made his Southbank debut in 1996 playing the Tippett Piano Concerto. As an undergraduate in Cambridge he performed the complete piano works of Olivier Messiaen, an experience which sparked his continuing research interest in Messiaen’s music and that of his students.

Roderick’s long-standing duo partnerships with violinists Chloë Hanslip and Narimichi Kawabata have seen him perform widely in Europe, the United States and Asia, including recitals at Seoul Arts Centre, Auditorium du Louvre, Schloss Elmau and Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall. He is a founder-member of the avant-garde Ensemble Plus-Minus, with whom he has appeared at the Huddersfield, Ultima (Oslo) and TRANSIT (Leuven) festivals, and is also a regular guest pianist with the chamber ensemble CHROMA. Many of his performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, as well as on national radio in France, Japan and South Korea, and he has recently featured on CD recordings on the Innova, Guild, and Victor (Japan) labels.

Chroma Ensemble

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Who or what inspired you to take up the violin, and make it your career? 
My older brother had started on Suzuki method, and I always kicked up a big fuss if he was allowed to do something I wasn’t!   So when I was 6 my parents got hold of a violin and a teacher for me.   I think I decided pretty much right away I was going to be a violinist – although I was also convinced I could be a pianist, singer and ballerina at the same time.
Who or what were the most important influences on your musical life and career? 
My biggest influence was the wonderful Sidney Griller who I was fortunate to learn with when I was 10 – he was both ceaselessly generous with his time and knowledge, and unrelenting in his expectations, and I know I could never have had the same courage to explore the music and stretch boundaries if it hadn’t been for Sidney.   Since then so many people have opened my eyes to new ideas, colours, sounds and music.
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far? 
I think probably the biggest continual challenge for me is to find balance.   It always seems so impossible to find the place where you’re doing enough to excite and stretch you, but without half killing yourself, and still managing to have a life.   Of course today I’m failing miserably – I’m typing this in a hotel in the middle of the night after a long day of rehearsals, practising and admin, listening to my colleagues having a fabulous time in the room next door!
Which performance/recordings are you most proud of?  
Strangely they aren’t necessarily the ones where I feel I played especially well.   But when someone has been particularly moved it reminds me there is a real point to performing.
Which particular works do you think you play best? 
I think probably anything that really has something to say for itself and isn’t just tricks or noises.
How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season? 
A lot of decisions are made for me by concert promoters.   But I do enjoy looking out fantastic music that isn’t played much – either less well known works by celebrated composers, or music by people who have been unfairly forgotten.
Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why? 
There are the obvious places with amazing character and acoustics like Wigmore Hall, of course.   But in the end a venue for me is more made by the audience – you can play in a terrible acoustic but have a fabulous audience, and that will make the venue feel special.
Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to? 
There’s so much great music out there to perform, it’s usually what I’m playing at the time…. To listen to, going by the plays on my iPod, it’s a strange mix of John Coltrane, Bartok playing Bartok, Britten Violin Concerto, a Shetland fiddle group called Fiddlers Bid, Sibelius Symphonies and U2…
What is your most memorable concert experience? 
Possibly the first concert I went to when I was 7, listening to my first violin teacher leading a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion at St. Paul’s Cathedral.   But there have been loads of very memorable performing experiences too, like playing Walton Concerto for the opening of the open-air amphitheatre in his home on Ischia, or a particularly unforgettable Death and the Maiden at IMS Prussia Cove a few years back with Pekka Kuusisto, James Boyd and Richard Harwood – and one of my very first performances in a local music festival playing a piece that mostly used open G and D strings, when slowly but surely, throughout the duration of the piece, my G String completely unwound.
What do you enjoy doing most?  
Walking on the beach and talking to the seals in Orkney

Fenella received her early training from Sidney Griller C.B.E. and Itzhak Rashkovsky whilst a scholar at the Purcell School, where she was awarded the Gertrude Hopkins Prize and the Guivier Award for an outstanding contribution to the string department.    She then won a scholarship to study with David Takeno at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.   Fenella completed her post-graduate studies as a scholar at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, Düsseldorf in Ida Bieler’s class, and was awarded the highest attainable mark both for the ‘Diplom’ exam and the ‘Konzertexamen’ soloists’ diploma.   At the same time Fenella studied in Andreas Reiner’s chamber music class at the Folkwang Hochschule, Essen.   Masterclasses have taken Fenella as far afield as Keshet Eilon, Israel, the Schleswig Holstein Festival and the Rheinischen Streicherakademie in Germany, and IMS Prussia Cove, in Cornwall, studying among others with Pamela Frank, Lorand Fenyves, Ferenc Rados, Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Levon Chilingirian, Thomas Brandis, Simon Rowland Jones, Thomas Riebl, Steven Doane, Johannes Goritzki and Krzysztof Penderecki.

www.fenellahumphreys.com

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A visit to the Austrian Cultural Forum last night for a short recital and presentation by pianist Alisdair Kitchen to mark the launch of a new interactive online project Haydn on Flipboard.

I first met Alisdair on Twitter last July when he launched his TwitterGoldbergs project, in which he released a single Goldberg Variation every day for a month. The project was supported by Norman Lebrecht via his Slipped Disc blog. Soon after, Alisdair and I met in Real Life, and we made a podcast in which Alisdair discusses his fascination with Bach’s Goldbergs, the value of recording and sharing music in the 21st century and a general conversation about his musical influences and career to date. What I particularly liked about the TwitterGoldbergs project was its immediacy and accessibility: one could listen whenever one wanted to, and catch up on missed installments via Alisdair’s Twitter feed or on YouTube (where the recordings were hosted). It also allowed one to really enjoy each individual variation and appreciate the artistry of Bach’s writing.

Keen to explore the piano music of Haydn, which Alisdair feels is sadly underrated (and somewhat under-represented in concert programmes), and in an attempt to create an interactive project redolent of the Viennese coffee house culture, which Haydn would have known well, Alisdair’s Haydn on Flipboard uses an application, Flipboard, which allows the user to create an online scrapbook of links which can be shared, and he is inviting readers to contribute items for future issues (you may see something from this blog amongst the pages of the first issue). While perusing the articles, one can enjoy Alisdair playing Haydn via SoundCloud. This aspect of the application works best on tablets and smart phones: if viewing the Flipboard on a PC or Mac, you can listen to Alisdair via his YouTube channel. Thus, Alisdair hopes to create a community of listeners, readers and contributors – a kind of “virtual coffee house”, if you will. You can in fact enjoy a cup of coffee while reading Alisdair’s Flipboard.

For his recital, Alisdair chose to play what is generally considered to be Haydn’s last piano sonata, the great E flat, No. 52. This is well-known and widely performed, sometimes in a programme featuring the last piano sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert (as here). Before this, he played the Andante and Variations in F minor, Hob.XVII: 6, a work with an interesting “double variation” device, which Haydn pioneered, of two themes, in minor and major respectively. Played with commitment and a very obvious affection for this music, there were moments of great poignancy and melancholy which seemed to look forward, beyond Beethoven, to Schubert. The E-flat Sonata was performed with equal commitment, Alisdair enjoying the full range of sonorities available from the magnificent Bosendorfer piano which resides at the ACF.

Haydn on Flipboard

Twitter Goldbergs Podcasts

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Last month I was fortunate enough to have a piano lesson with noted pianist and pedagogue Alan Fraser.

Originally from Montreal, Canada, Fraser is a professor of piano at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, where he now lives with his family. Alan Fraser is best known for his writings on piano technique, including The Craft of Piano. His piano technique is the result of much research into earlier piano schools and methods, and has resulted in a deeper understanding of the complex physical, mental and emotional processes of artful piano playing. The underlying unifying theme is his analysis of the the innate structure and function of the human hand, which helps you replace tension or over-relaxation with effective hand activation – it’s not so much about the hand’s shape or position as how it moves. He is also an ardent champion and senior practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method, which focuses on learning and movement, and which can bring about improved movement and enhanced functioning. Not dissimilar to Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais can permanently improve  posture, balance and coordination, and relieve tension and physical discomfort.

I was curious to meet Alan, having come across his writings online and in his book, and via the recommendations of colleagues, and I found him an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher (I was also permitted to observe him teaching another student). While some of his technique and suggestions runs counter to my own teacher’s philosophy, he had interesting and valuable advice and techniques for relieving tension and producing a vibrant sound, and I think as an adult student it is always useful to play for teachers other than one’s regular tutor.

Alan runs regular seminars and masterclasses across Europe and America. Further information about his teaching, writing and performing can be found on his website

It is standard practice for him to film his lessons, and I have uploaded my lesson with him to YouTube to allow others to observe the lesson.