Leeds Piano Festival 2019: 2018 Competition Winner Eric Lu joins Steven Osborne and Barry Douglas for annual celebration of piano in Leeds and London

By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | January 22, 2019

Extensive learning and engagement activities take piano out of the concert hall and into communities

Outstanding young scholars from Lang Lang International Music Foundation also perform

“Artistry of that kind is rare in pianists of any age; to find it in a 20-year-old is simply astounding.”
The Daily Telegraph

Following his win at the Leeds International Piano Competition in September 2018, 21-year-old pianist Eric Lu returns to ‘The Leeds’ for Leeds Piano Festival, with recitals in Leeds and London. World-renowned pianists Steven Osborne and Barry Douglas also perform recitals, with Osborne leading a masterclass with Young Scholars from the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, building on the ongoing relationship between the Foundation and The Leeds.

Eric-Lu-winner-of-the-Leeds-International-Piano-Competition-2018-performs-at-the-Finals-at-Leeds-Town-Hall-c-Simon-Wilkinson-Photography-e1537184338402

The Festival continues the much-enriched programme of events that surrounded the 2018 Competition, allowing audiences to engage with the piano and The Leeds beyond the triennial Competition. As part of The Leeds’ commitment to developing new and exciting ways of bringing the piano to as wide an audience as possible, the Festival – successfully inaugurated in 2018 – will again comprise many learning and engagement activities, including the return of the ‘Discover the Piano: Piano Fantasia’ on 28 March – The Leeds’ biggest primary school event to date, reaching more than 1,000 schoolchildren. The Young Scholars also participate in learning activities in primary schools and adult care settings in both Leeds and London – the latter once again in partnership with Wigmore Hall’s learning and participation programme – inspiring music lovers young and old with their prodigious talents.

Leeds Piano Festival recitals

Eric Lu’s return to The Leeds is part of the revolutionary prize package at The Leeds last year, designed with career development in mind. The prize also included world-wide management with Askonas Holt, a release of his Leeds-winning performance on major label Warner Classics (released to much acclaim in November 2018), opening the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2018/19 season, mentoring with jury members and more. Lu performs Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 – a piece he performed in the Competition semi-finals and released as a single on Warner Classics following his win – as well as works by Mozart, Brahms and Handel.

Former Royal Philharmonic Society ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’ Steven Osborne explores Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas. Osborne is a renowned interpreter of Beethoven’s music, not least from his critically-acclaimed recordings of the composer’s piano sonatas on the Hyperion label, and these recitals offer a rare opportunity to see him perform in an intimate setting.

Internationally-renowned pianist Barry Douglas pairs miniatures with more expansive works in both halves of his programme for the Festival, contrasting Tchaikovsky’s vignettes The Seasons with his Grande Sonata in G major, before pairing Rachmaninov’s Six Moments Musicaux with Schubert’s intense Sonata in A minor.

The Festival also showcases three Young Scholars from the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, developing the continuing relationship between the Foundation and the Leeds. Three exceptional young pianists, Aliya Alsafa, Jaspar Heymann and Shuheng Zhang – handpicked and mentored by Lang Lang, the Competition’s Global Ambassador –perform recitals at both Festival venues, as well as participate in a masterclass led by Steven Osborne at Leeds College of Music.

Speaking at the Finals of the 2018 Competition – where he also presented prizes and was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leeds – Lang Lang stated: “I’m extremely proud of my association with the city of Leeds, and with the Piano Competition – which is doing so much to unite excellence and accessibility”.

Closing the Festival, celebrity pianist Alistair McGowan returns to The Leeds with Introduction to Classical Piano at Besbrode Pianos. An alumnus of the University of Leeds, McGowan previously performed at The Leeds during Piano + events at the 2018 Competition, and his 2017 recording The Piano Album reached Number One in the UK Classical Album Charts.

Learning and Engagement

In addition to their recitals and masterclass, the Young Scholars participate in many external learning and engagement activities, following the success of similar events at last year’s Festival. As well as performing in the Piano Fantasia to over 1,000 primary schoolchildren, they also visit local primary schools in both Leeds and London, as well as adult care settings.

The University of Leeds, a principal partner of the Competition, hosts a ‘Steinway Experience’ on 30 March as part of Be Curious, the University’s research open day, where families can enjoy these wonderful instruments. Steinway & Sons, also a partner of The Leeds, has provided the pianos for the Competition since its beginnings in 1963.

Coinciding with Piano Day on 29 March, pop-up performances take place on the Leeds Piano Trail, in partnership with Leeds Business Improvement District (BID). These Besbrode pianos, decorated by local artists, were a popular feature of last year’s Competition and encouraged the public to play and experience the pianos at high-profile locations around Leeds city centre; most of the trail pianos stayed in place after the Competition due to the huge popularity of the initiative.

Adam Gatehouse, Artistic Director of the Leeds International Piano Competition, said: “After winning over both the jury and audiences at the 2018 Competition, we’re delighted to welcome Eric Lu back to The Leeds for the second annual Leeds Piano Festival. We’re thrilled too that Steven Osborne, Barry Douglas and the extraordinary Lang Lang Scholars will join him in both Leeds and London, allowing audiences to experience their remarkable talent and help us share in wonderful performances of great piano music. Deepening our roots in our communities by developing fun, diverse and inclusive events to enable more people to discover and fall in love with the piano is also crucial to our mission, and the Festival continues its inspiring work to attract ever-wider audiences.”

Tickets for the Leeds recitals and the masterclass can be booked here, and the London recitals here.

Leedspiano.com

@leedspiano

Professionals side-by-side with outstanding students to perform ‘Metamorphosen’

By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | May 22, 2018

London Orchestra Project

Strauss: Metamorphosen

Sunday 27 May 2018 at 19:30, LSO St Lukes, London, EC1 V 9NG

The London Orchestra Project, a new venture where principal players from across London’s professional orchestras sit side-by-side with outstanding students and recent graduates from London’s music colleges, performs Strauss’s deeply moving Metamorphosen along with Ligeti’s intricately rhythmic Ramifications and Bartok’s folk inspired Divertimento on Sunday 27 May at LSO St Lukes.

Co-founded by Stephen Bryant, leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and conductor James Ham, the orchestra consists of a true 50/50 split of professional players to recent graduates. Speaking about LOP’s unique approach to player development, James Ham says: “We’re very excited by this concert and are fortunate to have some of London’s finest orchestral players on board. It’s a way for students and graduates on the cusp of a professional orchestral career to directly benefit from the knowledge and insight from some of the UK’s most experienced orchestral musicians. Our future plans also include working with emerging composers and ultimately establishing LOP as a gateway to the profession”.

Stephen Bryant added: “By bringing together principal players from across London, our focus is very much founded on quality in terms of not only the players, but also the experience of the students and graduates involved, our choice of programmes and the musical experience for the audience”

For this concert, Stephen Bryant will lead graduate players from the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire alongside principal players from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London Sinfonietta, Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

www.londonorchestraproject.co.uk

Tickets: £15 (£5 for students and under 18s) are available from the Barbican Box Office: tickets@barbican.org.uk

Tel: 020 7638 8891 (10am-8pm Mon-Sat, 11am-8pm Sun)

(source: press release)

Music at the Edge: a new Baroque festival launches at LSO St Luke’s

By The Cross-Eyed Pianist | January 7, 2018

“Is Baroque music about composers or performers?” mused Lindsay Kemp in an article ahead of the launch of his new festival of Baroque music at the splendid venue that is LSO St Luke’s. The inaugural concert was given by Joanna Macgregor in a programme which sought to confirm Kemp’s assertion that Baroque musical festivals don’t have to be about historically informed performances (HIP), or period instruments and people in periwigs.

Kemp, who was artistic director of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music (LFBM) which morphed into the London Festival of Baroque Music when Lufthansa withdrew funding, is clearly well-versed in presenting ambitious musical ventures (he’s also senior producer at BBC Radio 3 and a writer on music), and in creating Baroque at the Edge he decided he wanted to do something that was not just another early music festival, but rather a festival of music which “anyone can come and enjoy” (surely all music festivals and concerts should be thus?). Hosting the majority of the concerts of the weekend festival at LSO St Luke’s is symbolic for Kemp too – “an 18th-century church on the outside, and a beautiful modern concert hall on the inside“. The programmes in Baroque at the Edge seek to celebrate Baroque music for what it is – wonderful music first and foremost for anyone to play without worrying about HIP and all that it encompasses – combined with music from other eras and genres. In short, a modern “no rules Baroque festival” to attract the kind of audience who wouldn’t normally go to Baroque or early music concerts, and also people from the locale in which St Luke’s is situated – trendy Shoreditch, Hoxton, Islington and the City.

joanna20macgregor

It was good to see the first concert so well-attended. Joanna Macgregor’s programme offered a typically provocative and eclectic selection of music on the theme of birds (in the first half) and ground basses/the Chaconne (second half), grouping works by Couperin, Daquin, Rameau, Poglietti, Byrd, Purcell and Pachelbel with music by Janaček, Messiaen, Birtwistle, Glass, Liszt and Gubaidulina. The programme opened with a triptych of Baroque works recalling birdsong (cuckoos, nightingales), characterful works delicately enunciated, written for the court, yet tender and intimate in expression. Macgregor introduced the sets of pieces: more softly-spoken than the first three works, she would have benefited from some amplification for those of us towards the back of the hall (or even some programme notes, though one of the stated aims of the festival is “no programme notes, no lectures”). The twentieth-century works were more satisfying, in particular the bird pieces by Messiaen from his Petites esquisses d’oiseaux and Birtwistle’s melancholy Oockooing Bird (written when the composer was just 16) with some lovely musical colours and highly evocative filigree chirruppings in the upper register. These were reflected in Poglietti’s Aria bizarre del Rossignolo, an early example of descriptive instrumental music where the nightingale’s song appears throughout the work in various virtuosic passages, replete with trills and short, syncopated attacks. Here was Baroque truly at the edge – the music freed from its courtly cage to take flight in a series of vivid improvisatory episodes.

The second half focused on the ground bass, a repeated pattern in the bass over which a series of variations or improvisations are played, and closed with Sofia Gubaidulina’s monumental Chaconne, preceded by a reflective Chaconne in F minor by Pachelbel, expressively played by Macgregor. Two works by Philip Glass were intended to demonstrate the use of the ground bass device in modern music, but these pieces felt rather flat; in fact, in this half, the Baroque pieces were far more rewarding. Joanna Macgregor offered one final work on a ground bass, Handel’s magnificent dramatic Passacagalia in g minor, HWV 432, as an encore.

This was an interesting and varied selection of pieces, elegantly presented. While I enjoyed most of the music, I was not fully convinced that this programme said anything new or different about Baroque music, nor felt particularly “edgy”. But perhaps the programme did at least serve one of the key aims of the festival: to allow artists like Joanna Macgregor to take Baroque music and see where it leads them, freed from worries of ‘authenticity’ or being ‘correct’, and this programme demonstrated that composers from any era can take a theme or concept and work imaginatively with it, be it birdsong or the ground bass.

Friday 5 January 2018, LSO St Luke’s

Joanna Macgregor, piano

Programme:

Rameau – Le Rappel des oiseaux

Daquin – Le Coucou

Couperin – Le Rossignol-en-amour

Janáček – The Barn Owl has not flown away! (from On an Overgrown Path)

Messiaen – Le Rouge-gorge (Petites esquisses d’oiseaux)

Sir Harrison Birtwistle – Oockooing Bird

Couperin – Les Fauvétes plaintives

Messiaen – Le Merle noir (Petites esquisses d’oiseaux)

Hossein Alizâdeh – Call of the Birds