SITAR with TABLA & STRING QUINTET

Jasdeep Singh Degun & Ensemble 360

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 23 March 2026, 7.30pm

Tickets:
£8 – £20

Past Event

Home› What's on› SITAR with TABLA & STRING QUINTET

DEGUN Alaap + Veer for sitar, tabla and string quintet (9′)
DEGUN Abbhā for sitar, tabla and string quintet (5′)
STRAVINSKY II. Excentrique from ‘Three Pieces for String Quartet’ (2′)
DVORAK (arr. Nabarro) Indian Lament for string quintet (4′)
DEGUN Rageshri for sitar, tabla and string quintet (11′)
STRAVINSKY I. Danse from ‘Three Pieces for String Quartet’ (1′)
DEGUN Arya MII for sitar, tabla and string quintet (13′)
STRAVINSKY III. Cantique from ‘Three Pieces for String Quartet’ (4′)
DEGUN Lament for sitar, tabla and string quintet (7′)

A composer and virtuoso of the sitar with a classical string quintet makes for a spellbinding pairing. Ensemble 360 celebrates its 20th birthday with a gift to us – boundary-breaking new music created collaboratively. Jasdeep Singh Degun is no stranger to forming alliances in the music world. He was composer and co-music director for Opera North’s 2022 award-winning production of Orpheus, weaving a tapestry from the European and Indian traditions. ‘It’s really not a matter of different worlds meeting’, he reflects. ‘It’s just me: as much as I’m immersed in Indian classical music, I’m a product of this country; I’m a British composer.’ Both innovator and custodian of tradition, composer and performer, with a debut album made with the legendary Nitin Sawnhey released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, he is reshaping the musical landscape.

Series Discount: 20% discount if you book all 5 Portsmouth Chamber Music concerts.

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About the Artists

Jasdeep Singh Degun

Breaking down cultural boundaries with his extraordinary artistry and new approach to composition, virtuoso sitarist, Jasdeep Singh Degun, brings a new energy and vision to both Indian classical and contemporary music. He’s redefining genres and passionate about exposing music from his heritage to audiences across the globe. Learning under the careful guidance of Ustad Dharambir Singh MBE, Jasdeep has performed all over the world in many high profile productions and prestigious venues, including Buckingham Palace, the Amphitheatre in Doha, and Westminster Abbey at the Royal Commonwealth Service 2022 in the presence of the British Royal Family and Prime Minister.

Signed to the prestigious Real World Records, Jasdeep released his much anticipated debut album titled ‘Anomaly‘, working under the guidance of celebrated musician and producer Nitin Sawhney. Jasdeep was announced as Artist-in-Residence at Opera North, and in 2022 he was composer, co-music director and soloist in Opera North and South Asian Arts-uk’s acclaimed opera Orpheus. This production garnered five-star reviews and earned Jasdeep a 2022 Critics’ Circle Music Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Opera”.

Ensemble 360

Ensemble 360 has gained an enviable reputation across the UK for the quality and integrity of their performances. Formed in 2005, eleven musicians of international standing came together to take up residency in South Yorkshire with Music in the Round, establishing a versatile group comprising five string players, five wind players and a pianist. Get a glimpse of them in performance here.

The Ensemble 360 musicians share a passion for the music which radiates through each performance. Their enthusiasm, drive and musicality captivate audiences both through the quality of their playing and their engaging spoken introductions. Due to the flexible nature of the group’s line-up the repertoire possibilities are enormous; anything from baroque duos, through classical quartets to new commissions for all eleven players.

QUARTET FOR HEART & BREATH

Phaedra Ensemble & Lotte Betts-Dean

The Guildhall Lens Studio, Portsmouth

Monday 23 February 2026, 7.30pm

Tickets:
£8 – £20

Past Event

Home› What's on› QUARTET FOR HEART & BREATH

RICHARD REED PARRY Quartet for Heart and Breath (6’)
KATE WHITLEY Six Charlotte Mew Settings (16’)
JOHN TAVENER The World (10’)
JAMIE HAMILTON A Mouth in Search of a Voice Part 1 (9′)
MEREDITH MONK String Songs (20’)
CASSANDRA MILLER Thanksong (12’)

Music by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry opens this concert of sumptuous, 21st century compositions for string quartet, performed by Phaedra Ensemble with Lotte Betts-Dean, a vocalist praised by The Guardian for her “unmissable, urgent musicality”.

Following its collaboration with American composer Meredith Monk, performer and Godmother of the New York experimental music scene, Phaedra performs the composer’s only string quartet, String Songs. Mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean then joins the quartet to present works by Kate Whitley and John Tavener, as well as Cassandra Miller’s modern masterpiece Thanksong, a tender reflection on Beethoven’s late Quartet in A minor (Op.132).

Series Discount: 20% discount if you book all 5 Portsmouth Chamber Music concerts.

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Richard Reed Parry is best known as a guitarist in the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. Quartet for Heart and Breath is one of a series of pieces that Parry began work on during the band’s mammoth 2004-5 tour, that all have the same conceptual starting point: every note is played in sync with the heartbeat or breath of the musicians. While they are performing, the musicians wear stethoscopes under their clothes so they can clearly hear their own heartbeats, which in turn regulate their individual tempos.

The idea for Parry’s concept came about through reaction. After listening to a tranche of electroacoustic music that didn’t he didn’t feel any profound connection to, Parry sought a way to make music intimately connected to musicians’ bodies. Rather than opting for repetitive rhythms or dance figures, he decided to go deeper, beyond the skill of trained musicians, and straight for corporeal intuition. He began conceiving music directly related to the involuntary aspects of bodily functions: the speed of breath, eyes blinking, hearts beating.

When composing for others, Parry’s musical world brings together the minimal musical palettes of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and the musical systems of John Cage. Parry was interested in the latter through his pieces like I Ching, which use chance procedures to gradually relinquish the control the composer has over the realisation of the work. The result here is a naturally jumbled collection of tumbling rhythms, that manages to find a surprisingly soothing character amid the chaos.

Hugh Morris 2024

“I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else,” Virginia Woolf remarked of the poet Charlotte Mew. Born in 1869, Mew lived precariously in London; a life punctuated by tragic family circumstances, and with an aversion to any kind of publicity, she nevertheless possessed a selection of high-profile admirers from the city’s literary scene, including Thomas Hardy and Siegried Sassoon. Mew’s poem The Farmer’s Bride (1912) brought her wider acclaim. In that verse, a farmer takes a bride, and laments that she won’t reciprocate his desires. The folksy metre and bucolic imagery disguise what is a creepy, at times startling poem on a young woman’s objectification at the hands of an older man maddened by desire.

In 2020, Whitley, a composer and founder of Peckham’s Multi-Story Orchestra, reworked two separate collections of Mew settings (for male and female voice) into a new six-movement work for soprano and quartet. (“I like how the gender of the speaker in Mew’s poems is often ambiguous, so it has seemed to make sense,” she wrote in 2020.) Sea Love reminisces on a lover through a folk dialect, accompanied by waves of solo violin arpeggios. The folk-tinged feeling continues in The Farmer’s Bride, with scuttling string figures giving this movement a darkly theatrical quality. The sea returns as a theme in Rooms; where in Sea Love, it’s “everlastin,’” by Rooms, the sea becomes a “maddening” sound, outside a room “with a seaweed smell.” (Some of Mew’s artistic preoccupations involve confinement, feeling trapped, and longing to explore, themes that crop up in the first three settings.)

The fourth movement, I so liked Spring, works in a mirror form. For voice and solo violin once more, the two stanzas give reflections on a season before and after a lover. Where there’s a slight defiance to the previous text, Absence speaks to the intense anguish of the narrator’s loss; Whitley’s setting is sparse and spacious, with soprano accompanied mostly by gently plucked strings. There’s more pain in the final poem, Moorland Night, but it’s a pain that arrives through searching rather than inward reflection. Travelling through a harsh-weathered landscape, the narrator describes the search for “The Thing.” Mew’s narrator soon finds this Thing, yet, after such anguish, seems to find solace as she vows to return that Thing to the earth. Whitley’s animated setting is similarly journeying.

Hugh Morris 2024

“The World for string quartet and soprano solo should be performed at maximum intensity throughout. White hot, white cold – intensely loud, intensely soft – almost unbearable – that which is nowhere and everywhere – not human but divine – theanthropic.” These, the words of the piece’s composer, John Tavener. His ten-minute setting of the poet Kathleen Raine for soprano and quartet certainly lends itself to such extremities of thinking.

Despite the serene timbres, The World works in a currency of simple gestures taken to their limits, but the extremes Tavener finds comes through austerity rather than exuberance. The piece is built around a few key ideas: beginning with striking plucked chords, the soprano introduces a coupletted stepping motion which is passed around the ensemble. The fiendish soprano part finishes this theme with a flourish—a long, quiet, sustained note, suspended above the ensemble. A squiggly chorale-like passage brings the strings back together in rhythmic unison around an anchoring mid-range drone, and the whole sequence repeats again. Through these kinds of creative austerity, Tavener achieves a steely focus.

Hugh Morris 2024

A Mouth In Search Of A Voice is a music and multimedia work exploring stammering and dysfluency. Part 1: To Do This We Find A Shadow is the first movement of a larger evening-length work.

The work is built from recordings of people who stammer. Each instrumentalist carries their own playback device containing stammered voices: a kind of shadowed self, echoing theories within stammering of a divided or bifurcated identity. The ensemble listens and navigates, their musical material shaped by what they hear. Dysfluency is transplanted into the ensemble; the musicians become readers of a map that keeps redrawing itself.

The texts are drawn from recordings of multiple stammerers reading the same passages. Each voice filters the material differently: mumbling, muting, pausing, stuttering – creating iterations that never quite align. The friction of these voices evokes an unstable, unreliable narrative voice.

Jamie Hamilton 2026

Meredith Monk’s string quartet Stringsongs was written in 2004, and premiered at the Barbican in 2005 by the Kronos Quartet. Her first creation for these forces represented yet another strand for an artist whose uninhibited creating has seen her touch disciplines as varied as singing, composing, dance, choreography, visual art and playwriting.

In creating this extremely coherent yet slightly strange quartet, Monk got to know the players of the Kronos Quartet intimately. “The music came to life in surprising ways, colored by the distinctive ‘voice’ of each musician,” she wrote in a programme note. Perhaps the best example of this is Tendrils, the beautifully drawn-out, delicately crafted second movement which serves as the piece’s emotional core. Each player plays a wistful monologue, woven into an ensemble texture that spins forward for nine unbroken minutes.

Tendrils follows Cliff Edge; Monk’s straightforward harmonic and melodic building blocks never quite move as you expect, creating dissonances that are unexpectedly raw, while further intensifying the austere double-stopped chords that become a theme of the movement. The third movement, Obsidian Chorale, is the most ostensibly vocal of the four movements—after the unbroken polyphony of Tendrils, the quartet moves through a sequence of dark, quiet chords in unison, for barely two minutes. Phantom Strings, a fast final movement based on a chugging, uneven ostinato, doesn’t so much conclude as stop, ending this enigmatic piece with more questions than answers.

Hugh Morris 2024

Over the course of her career, Cassandra Miller, a Canadian composer currently living in London, has developed her own idiosyncratic way of composing that she calls “transformative mimicry.” Her music is usually rooted in other music that already exists; she listens to it, sings back a version of the parts, and then either sketches them using musical notation, or, in the case of Thanksong, creates an aural score out of her recordings. In a performance of Thanksong, each member of the ensemble listens to their own part on headphones, and plays by ear.

For this piece, her source material was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 Op. 132 in A minor, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang, after the thankful message Beethoven put at the heading of this movement. He had recently recovered from an intense intestinal illness, and described the third, a slow movement, as a “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity.”

Miller’s piece is one to get lost in. It has few grand milestones, preferring instead a more intimate language of blurred, burbling lines, encoding the feeling of players feeling their way through the piece into the composition. It’s delicate, and personal.

Hugh Morris 2024

About the Artists

Phaedra Ensemble

Phaedra Ensemble is a London-based collective of like-minded performers, pushing the boundaries of contemporary chamber music in bold and creative ways. Known for their innovative performances, this group of musicians curates cutting-edge new music alongside modern classics from the last 100 years. Creative collaboration is central to their approach, and over the last decade, they’ve partnered with exceptional artists from across the spectrum. Read more.

Lotte Betts-Dean

Lotte is a mezzo soprano and vocalist who has established herself as a leading interpreter of contemporary repertoire, art song and chamber music. She is equally at home in early music, vocal ensemble, opera, experimental music and non-classical collaborations, and has a passion for curation, programming, and interdisciplinary projects, and a fast-growing discography.

Lotte won the 2024 Young Artist of the Year at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, and in 2023 she was elected as Ambassador for Donne UK. Lotte was made Associate (ARAM) of the Royal Academy of Music in 2022, an honour reserved for alumni who have contributed significantly to the music profession. Read more.

THE LARK ASCENDING

Ensemble 360

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 19 January 2026, 7.30pm

Tickets
£8 – £20

Past Event

Home› What's on› THE LARK ASCENDING

HOLST Phantasy String Quartet (10′)
BRITTEN Three Divertimenti for String Quartet (10′)
HOLBROOKE Ellean Shona (4′)
HOWELLS Phantasy String Quartet (13′)
PURCELL Three-part Fantasias (8′)
HARRISON Clarinet Quintet (12′)
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (arr. Gerigk) The Lark Ascending

The violin soars melodiously above the rest of the quartet in the gorgeous arrangement of Vaughan Williams’ most popular work The Lark Ascending, which concludes this concert of English music for strings and clarinet. Fantasies from the Baroque gems of Purcell’s Three-part Fantasias to Imogen Holst’s Phantasy String Quartet sit alongside this perennial favourite.

Seri es Discount: 20% discount if you book all 5 Portsmouth Chamber Music concerts.

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Imogen Holst (1907-1984) composed her Phantasy String Quartet in 1928 (although it wasn’t premiered until several years after her death, in 2007). The piece typifies the composer’s early style, blending the English pastoral tradition with her own unique talents for melodic development, contrapuntal writing, and idiosyncratic quartet-textures. It won the Cobbet Prize – an award founded by the wealthy industrialist Walter Willson Cobbett to encourage composers to write ‘Phantasies’, works of one movement in the tradition of 16th and 17th-Century English ‘fancies’, ‘fantasies’, or ‘fantasias’. These were short instrumental works which, like Holst’s, did not adhere to strict forms but rather developed in their own imaginative and unexpected ways. Beginning with lush pastoral harmonies, Holst’s Phantasy transitions fluidly through episodes of meditative introspection and spirited energy.

Britten planned these movements as part of a five-movement Quartetto serioso with a subtitle from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: “Go play, boy, play!” An earlier version of the opening March was written for a suite inspired by the film Emil and the Detectives (the children’s novel by Erich Kästner was a great favourite of Britten’s), but this was never completed. Eventually he settled on a work in three movements, and the first performance was given by the Stratton Quartet at the Wigmore Hall on 25 February 1936. The audience response was chilly and a hurt Britten withdrew the Three Divertimenti, which were only published after his death. His brilliant gift for idiomatic quartet writing is already apparent in this early work – from the arresting rhythms and textures of the March to the beguiling central Waltz, and the driving energy of the closing Burlesque.

Joseph Holbrooke was a curious and sometimes infuriating character. His chamber music concerts would often include oddly aggressive notes for the audience, presenting – as he put it – ‘music to an apathetic public’ after which he ‘hopes to receive as few blows as possible (with the usual financial loss) in return.’ On another occasion, he refused to perform his Piano Concerto in Bournemouth: an insert in the programme explained that ‘Mr Joseph Holbrooke declines to play today because his name is not announced on the posters in large enough type.’ Setting his personal flaws to one side, he was capable of producing fine music, of which Eilean Shona is a brief and very attractive example. Eilean Shona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland and Holbrooke’s short work for clarinet and string quartet (reworked from a song for voice and piano) is haunting and evocative.

Nigel Simeone 2024

Herbert Howells (1892–1983): Phantasy String Quartet, Op. 25

In 1905, W.W. Cobbett launched a competition to breathe new life into British chamber music by reviving the ‘Phantasy’, an archaic form which Henry Purcell had made his own in about 1680. The competition’s criteria stated that ‘The parts must be of equal importance, and the duration of the piece should not exceed twelve minutes. Though the Phantasy is to be performed without a break, it may consist of different sections varying in tempi and rhythm.’ Composers including Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Arnold Bax and Frank Bridge all rose to the challenge, composing works under Cobbett’s auspices. In the 1917 competition, second prize (of 10 guineas) was awarded to Herbert Howells for his Phantasy String Quartet Op. 25 (the first prize that year went to Harry Waldo Warner). In Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, he wrote that in Howells’s Quartet ‘the fine tunes on which it is built are not traditional, but are by Howells himself … modal colouring persists throughout, and the themes are subjected to a process of permutation, rather than development, which is analogous to the process which tunes undergo when transmitted orally.’ Cobbett went on to say that Howells ‘contrives in the single movement of a phantasy to let his themes pass through a series of moods which are equivalent, in miniature, to the fully expressed phrases of a four-movement work’. The result is a quartet that has moments of striking beauty, with occasional echoes of the Tallis Fantasia by his friend Vaughan Williams.

Henry Purcell (1659–1695) was one of the most celebrated English composers of the Baroque era. Among his remarkable works is a series of Fantasias (or Fancies), composed in 1680 when Purcell was only 21 years old. Showcasing his profound skill with contrapuntal writing – in which each of the instrument’s melodic lines work both independently and as part of the musical-whole – the Fantasias are considered among the finest examples of the form and are regarded by many to be the ‘jewel in the crown of English consort music’. This wasn’t always the case, however. When Purcell composed these works, the Fantasia was quite unfashionable. King Charles II is said to have had ‘an utter detestation of Fancys’. Out of favour in the Royal court, Purcell’s Fantasias were therefore likely intended to be performed in domestic settings. Originally written for three viols, they are here transcribed for string trio (violin, viola, and cello).

Allegro moderato
Lento
Allegro molto e agitato

Pamela Harrison is a lesser-known English composer of the 20th Century. Born in Orpington, Greater London in 1915, Harrison produced many of her works during the Second World War. She studied at the Royal Northern College of Music under Australian pianist Arthur Benjamin, and regularly performed her own piano compositions as a student. Her Clarinet Quintet (1956) was one of three pieces inspired by and written for her friend Jack Brymer, who was one of the most renowned clarinettists of the 20th Century. The opening Allegro Moderato begins in a jaunty manor, but quickly gives way to an unsettled feeling, in both the rhythm and the melody. The Lento movement is spacious and full of emotional intensity, with the clarinet line floating above a static string accompaniment. The final movement, the Allegro molto e agitato sees the return of the opening theme, riding a flurry of notes in the accompanying parts. Ensemble 360’s Robert Plane has championed Harrison’s music and was responsible for the world premiere recordings of her clarinet chamber pieces.

© Nigel Simeone

Vaughan Williams began The Lark Ascending before the outbreak of the First World War, taking his inspiration from George Meredith’s 1881 poem of the same name. But he set this ‘Romance’ aside during the war and only finished it in 1920. The violinist Marie Hall gave the first performance of the original version for violin and piano in Shirehampton Public Hall (a district of Bristol) on 15 December 1920. Vaughan Williams dedicated the work to her, and she went on to give the premiere of the orchestral version six months later, when it was conducted by the young Adrian Boult at a concert in the Queen’s Hall in London. Free, serene and dream-like, this is idyllic music of rare and fragile beauty.

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

DEATH & THE MAIDEN

Dudok Quartet

The Guildhall Lens Studio, Portsmouth

Monday 17 November 2025, 7.30pm

Tickets:
£8 – £20

Past Event

Home› What's on› DEATH & THE MAIDEN

SAARIAHO Terra Memoria (18’)
GESUALDO Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (4’)
MUSSORGSKY Songs and Dances of Death (selection) (10’)
LISZT Via Crucis (selection) (10’)
SCHUBERT String Quartet No.14 in D minor, ‘Death & the Maiden’ (35’)

Described as “quite simply revelatory” (The Irish Times) and “stylish, open-minded and adventurous” (The Guardian), the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam has made its name as playful, inventive interpreters of the string quartet repertoire. Coached by Peter Cropper (first violin of the Lindsay String Quartet and founder of Music in the Round) in the early years of their collaboration, they have since gone from strength to strength. Presenting Schubert’s extraordinary and profound ‘Death and the Maiden’ String Quartet alongside their own arrangement of a 17th century Italian madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo and Kaija Saariaho’s modern masterpiece, Terra Memoria (‘Earth Memory’), this concert promises to thrill, intrigue and delight.

Series Discount: 20% discount if you book all 5 Portsmouth Chamber Music concerts

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“I feel when writing for a string quartet that I’m entering into the intimate core of musical communication,” the late Kaija Saariaho wrote of her second string quartet, Terra Memoria, in 2006. Twenty years separated her first and second outings for these forces, and while the electronics have departed in the journey from the initial Nymphéa to here (and the acute focus on timbre has relaxed), the pieces share a common musical argument. For one, there’s Saariaho’s continued fascination with the particular timbres and textures available to stringed instruments, like tremolandos, trills, and bowing techniques like playing at the bridge. What the two quartets also share is the sense of the music gleaming, resulting from these carefully chosen combinations.

Terra Memoria is a pretty straightforward title. “Earth refers to my material, and memory to the way I’m working on it,” Saariaho wrote. “The piece is dedicated “for those departed,” she continued. “Those of us who are left behind are constantly reminded of our experiences together: our feelings continue to change about different aspects of their personality, certain memories keep on haunting us in our dreams. Even after many years, some of these memories change, some remain clear flashes which we can relive.”

Saariaho died from brain cancer in 2023, so the piece becomes a kind of meta memorial today. But Terra Memoria is no redolent, misty-eyed tribute. Score indications vacillate frequently and distinctly, between misterioso, espressivo, and dolce (sweetly), followed by rasping sections called things like con violenza, impetuoso. The piece aches like a piece written a century before, full of expressive anguish and volatility. Listen for the waterfall-like constructions of limpid textures, and the stunning moment halfway through when the tiny, sky-high texture is delicately snuffed out.

The name of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, first spread across Italy because of a grand scandal. In 1590, after discovering his wife and her lover in flagrante, Gesualdo killed them both on the spot. Given all of the actors in this honour killing were drawn from nobility, news of the murder travelled particularly quickly; only later did his idiosyncratic corpus of strange harmonies emerge.

Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, a morose yet sparkily inventive madrigal for five voices, comes from Gesualdo’s sixth and most stylistically adventurous book of madrigals, published in 1611, two years before his death aged 47. Gesualdo’s late madrigals are notable for their harmonic ingenuity. They are heavily chromatic, emotionally volatile, and utilise false relations—chromatic contradictions, where two voices overlap by a semitone at the same time to create a particularly scrunchy moment—frequently. The effect is polarising. Eminent 18th century music historian Charles Burney described the opening of Moro, lasso as “extremely shocking and disgusting.” But, over 400 years since Gesualdo’s death, it still sounds strikingly unlike anything else in the musical canon.

© Hugh Morris 2025

Like Pictures at an Exhibition and his opera Khovanshchina, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death number among the many works that required finishing or orchestrating by his composer friends. Today, they exist in many orchestrated versions, even serving as a jump-off point for Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, but the first version to exist was completed by Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, published in 1882, a year after Mussorgsky’s death.

Each of the four songs—Lullaby, Serenade, Trepak, and Field Marshal—are a poetic snapshot of a specific death; respectively, of a child, a girl, a drunken peasant, and a soldier. Mussorgsky set texts by Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, a younger friend of the composer, who lodged with Mussorgsky in the mid 1870s.

In some ways the collection is a tale of Mussorgsky’s domestic situation, setting words by one housemate, and later having it orchestrated by another, in Rimsky-Korsakov. It also tells of Mussorgsky’s preoccupations. Death was firmly on his mind, having experienced the loss of friends—the death of painter Victor Hartmann inspired him to write Pictures at an Exhibition—as well as suffering from frequent alcohol-induced health problems himself.

This cycle is certainly shadowed by death, but it’s interesting to note how death becomes an inevitable, inescapable fact, and in that way, a figure approaching the benign. (In this way, it bears a resemblance to Schubert’s calm, consoling figure who appears in the second stanza of Death and the Maiden.) In the first setting, Death appears at the door of a mother, then as a mysteriously seductive knight in the second, an enticing figure to a drunken figure in the third, and finally, the inevitable consequence of battle.

© Hugh Morris 2025

One of the great surprises of 19th century musical history was the about turn of Franz Liszt, the flamboyant pianist and supporter of radical progressive motion in music, who later took minor orders at the Vatican in 1865, and closed out his life as Abbé Liszt. However, Liszt approached church music with the much the same spirit that he sought the music of the future among the members of Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in his earlier years; writing in 1835 in De la musique religieuse, Liszt sought a “regeneration” of religious music, and saw the composer’s social role extending into the church as well as secular musical contexts.

Though there is a continuation of spirit, this is a Liszt unlike the fireworks of the B Minor sonata, the symphonic poems or the piano concerti. Via Crucis is a collaged work of musical pictures corresponding to the stations of the cross found in many Catholic churches. He finds a passionate if contained expressivity in this collection, which draws on plainchant and Bach’s Passion settings.

© Hugh Morris 2025

i. Allegro
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo
iv. Presto
The beginning of 1824 was a very difficult period for an ill, penniless and depressed Franz Schubert. “I find myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,” he wrote to his friend Josef Kupelwieser. “I might as well sing every day now, for upon retiring to bed each night I hope that I may not wake again, and each morning only recalls yesterday’s grief.”

But he succeeded in channeling this moroseness into creation, and Schubert produced some of his most celebrated contributions to chamber music literature during this sorrow-filled period. Not only did he produce the String Quartet in A Minor D804, he returned—perhaps driven by his own reckoning with mortality—to his 1817 setting of Matthias Clodius’s Death and the Maiden, a two-stanza text which opens with the maiden’s frightened plea and closes with Death’s calm response.

This music forms the basis of the second movement, a theme which spins out in variations before turning towards its somber home. It follows an explosive first movement which introduces the composition’s underlying principles: a throbbing, unrelenting triplet figure, and a hewing towards minor tonalities. This is a work that plumbs the depths of despair.

The triplet theme returns as an accompaniment to the first violin’s descant in the first variation of the second movement. Then, two dances of death: A fast, jolting Scherzo, with a rare glimpse of the major mode sets up a galloping tarantella-rondo finale. It ends, completely spent, with two huge chords.

© Hugh Morris 2025

About the Artists

Dudok Quartet

The Dudok Quartet (Amsterdam) has forged a reputation as one of the most creative and versatile quartets of its generation. With its ethos of ‘sharing the heart of music’, the quartet believes that chamber music is an act of friendship and play to be shared directly with audiences, and is committed to crafting unique and eclectic programmes that engage listeners in imaginative ways. Read more.

INTIMATE EPICS: BEETHOVEN & JANÁČEK

Fibonacci Quartet

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 6 October 2025, 7.30pm

Tickets:
£8 – £20

Past Event

Home› What's on› INTIMATE EPICS: BEETHOVEN & JANÁČEK

HAYDN String Quartet Op.33 No.4 (16’)
JANÁČEK String Quartet No.2 ‘Intimate Letters’ (26’)
BEETHOVEN String Quartet in C sharp minor Op.131 (40’)

With a glittering array of prizes and accolades, this young quartet has rapidly made a name as one of the most exciting European quartets working today. Through three great string quartets, they will showcase their staggering range and committed artistry. Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’ is a rich late work of love and longing, and this programme is crowned by Beethoven’s towering final achievement blending a lightness of touch with the depth of a lifetime of music: both intimate and epic.

Series Discount: 20% discount if you book all 5 Portsmouth Chamber Music concerts.

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Allegro moderato
Scherzo. Allegretto – Minore
Largo
Presto

Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets, also known as the “Russian” quartets, are a collection of six string quartets composed in 1781. These works represent a significant milestone in the development of the string quartet as a genre, and they are widely regarded as Haydn’s finest compositions.

This quartet in B flat major opens with a vibrant and exuberant Allegro moderato showcasing Haydn’s signature humour and wit, with playful exchanges between the four instruments. The Scherzo is a lively and rhythmic dance that is full of energy and syncopation. The Adagio is a poignant and expressive, aria-like movement that showcases Haydn’s gift for melody and his ability to evoke deep emotion through music. The quartet concludes with a dazzling and virtuosic finale, that brings the work to an exhilarating conclusion. Throughout the quartet, Haydn’s use of form and inventive musical ideas play with tonality, harmonic structure and texture to create a rich and complex musical tapestry. The quartet is marked by surprise, unexpected turns, and humour, while maintaining a sense of coherence and unity. Haydn’s Opus 33 No.4 is a landmark in the development of the genre: a work of great beauty, depth, and complexity.

Andante
Adagio
Moderato
Allegro

This extraordinary work was the result of extraordinary circumstances. As a married man in his 70s, Janáček had been head over heels in love with the much younger Kamila Stösslová for a decade by the time he wrote his 2nd String Quartet. This was a passionate (if largely one-sided) love that is eloquently expressed in the hundreds of letters he wrote her, and in the pieces that were directly inspired by her – from operas such as Katya Kabanova to the much more private world of chamber music. On 29 January he told Kamila about the latest piece to be inspired by her: ‘Today it’s Sunday and I’m especially sad. I’ve begun to work on a quartet; I’ll give it the name Love Letters.’ By 19 February the sketch was finished, and a couple of weeks later Janáček had written out a fair copy. He changed his mind several times about the title, eventually settling on Intimate Letters. The original scoring, noted on the manuscript, was to include a viola d’amore – the viola of love – but this was more symbolic than practical and after a private play-through, Janáček abandoned the idea.

Janáček’s letters to Kamila are revealing about the programmatic content of this quartet. The first movement he described as ‘the impression of when I saw you for the first time!’ and the third evokes a moment ‘when the earth trembled’. The fourth movement was ‘filled with a great longing – as if it were fulfilled.’ As for the whole work, he confided in April 1928 that ‘it’s my first composition whose notes glow with all the dear things that we’ve experienced together. You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving.’

Janáček died on 12 August 1928, and the quartet had to wait another decade before it was published, by which time both Kamila and Janáček’s long-suffering wife Zdenka were dead. Intimate Letters stands as one of the most personal and original works in the twentieth-century quartet repertoire. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera summarized the essence of Janáček’s art as ‘capturing unknown, never expressed emotions, and capturing them in all their immediacy’.

Nowhere is it more immediate – or more emotional – than in this quartet.

i. Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo
ii. Allegro molto vivace
iii. Allegro moderato
iv. Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile
v. Presto
vi. Adagio quasi un poco andante
vii. Allegro

Beethoven himself considered the C sharp minor Quartet to be his finest work: an immense single span comprising seven movements that are performed without a break. When Richard Wagner heard the work performed by the Maurin-Chevillard Quartet in Paris, he was overcome with admiration. It’s always fascinating to read one great composer writing about another, and despite the purple prose, Wagner’s remarks are a wonderful tribute. He likens the Quartet to a “Beethoven day”, and describes the music as follows:

“I should designate the long introductory Adagio – than which, probably, nothing more melancholy has ever been expressed in sound – as the awakening on the morning of a day … It is, at the same time, a penitential prayer, a conference with God. The introspective eye views (Allegro, 6/8) there, too, the comforting phenomenon in which Desire becomes a sweet, sorrowful play with itself: the innermost dream-image awakens in a most charming reminiscence. And now (in the short transitional Allegro moderato) it is as though the Master, recollecting his art, addressed himself to his magic work. He employs (Andante, 2/4) the revived power of spells peculiarly his own, to charm a graceful shape … in order that he may enrapture himself by ever new and unprecedented transformations … We now fancy (Presto 2/2) that we see him who is so completely happy, cast a glance of indescribable serenity upon the outer world. … Everything is rendered luminous by his inner happiness. … He now reflects on how he must begin (Adagio, 3/4), a short but troubled meditation … He awakens, and now strikes the strings for a dance, in such a way as the world has never yet heard (Allegro Finale). It is the dance of the world itself: wild delight, the lamentation of anguish, ecstasy of love, highest rapture … and sorrow: suddenly, lightning quivers, the angry tempest growls; and above all this, the mighty player … smiles at himself, for the incantation was to him, after all, only a play. Night beckons to him. His day is finished.”

Nigel Simeone 2013

About the Artists

Fibonacci String Quartet, photo by Julia Bohle

Fibonacci Quartet

The Fibonacci Quartet are one of Europe’s leading young string quartets. Formed at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the quartet teach as Quartet in Residence at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama as well as at the Royal Academy of Music in their position as Nina Drucker Fellows. Winners at the 2024 Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) International auditions, they were also recently appointed as Grand Résident ensemble at ProQuartet in Paris for seasons 2025-2027.

The only ensemble ever to win both the First and Audience Prize at the Premio Paolo Borciani International String Quartet Competition in 2024, the Fibonacci’s are prolific prize winners, winning prestigious awards including First Prize in the Royal Overseas League Chamber Music Competition, First Prize in the Cavatina Chamber Music Competition, The RPS Henderson Chamber Ensemble Award, First Prize in the International Triomphe de l’Art Competition in Belgium, The Kirckman Society Award, Audience Prize at the Schiermonnikoog Festival and Special Prizes of the Shostakovich Association in Paris and Peermusic in Hamburg.

The 2025/26 season sees them continue their busy schedule, with performances including performances at Vienna Musikverein, Berlin Philharmonie, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Wigmore Hall, Munich Prinzregententheater and Philharmonie de Paris. Read more.

CLOSE UP: MUSIC FOR CURIOUS YOUNG MINDS

Ensemble 360 & Elinor Moran

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 17 March 2025, 1.30pm

For tickets, please email hayley.reay@portsmouthguildhall.org.uk

Home› What's on› CLOSE UP: MUSIC FOR CURIOUS YOUNG MINDS

A lively schools concert, presented by Elinor Moran and featuring five wind musicians (flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon and horn). Together they breathe life into the wondrous world of chamber music.

They’ll play well-known classical favourites from Britten and Debussy to Haydn and Holst, alongside more recent works such as Anna Meredith’s playful portrait of a moth and Valerie Coleman’s celebratory Kwanzaa dance. Perfect for 7-11 year olds, this is a lively and interactive concert.

Ideal for 7-11 year olds.

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

Elinor Moran

Elinor is in demand as a vocal workshop leader and animateur. She regularly works in learning and participation teams with such companies as ROH, ETO, Opera North, Snape Maltings, Garsington Opera and as far away as The Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus in Toronto.

Elinor has just returned from singing with André Rieu and his Johann Strauss Orchestra as a soloist on a world tour. She was a soloist on a SONY BMG recording “The Best Of Gilbert And Sullivan” which reached the top of the Classical Chart and can be heard on Blossom Street’s new Naxos recording of choral music by female composers “This Day”. Her recent roles include Mimi La Boheme (in the Olivier Award winning OperaUpClose production at the Soho Theatre and Charing Cross Theatre and Tour) and she has been the recipient of a Garsington Opera Chorus Award.

Elinor studied voice at Chetham’s School Of Music and The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 2012 she performed a dance role in Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but has since put away her hip hop shoes (until the right future opportunity…).

SCHOOLS’ CONCERT: GIDDY GOAT

Ensemble 360 & John Webb

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 2 December 2024, 1.30pm

To book email hayley.reay@guildhalltrust.org.uk

Home› What's on› SCHOOLS’ CONCERT: GIDDY GOAT

Music in the Round invites your class to take part in a brilliant music project, culminating in a live concert at the Portsmouth Guildhall.

Paul Rissmann (composer) has created a fantastic piece of music based around the children’s book Giddy Goat (Jamie Rix and Lynne Chapman) which includes songs for your class to learn and join in with in the concert.

Our EY and KS1 practitioners will support you to embed singing and music-making in classroom learning throughout the project, with training, resources, and in-school support newly developed around the Giddy Goat story. The project introduces young children to classical music in a fun and educational setting, including a concert featuring strings, woodwind and horn, presented together with story-telling and projected illustrations.

Being a mountain goat is no fun when you are scared of heights! Stand poor Giddy on a mountain ledge and his head starts spinning and his knees turn to jelly. But can he find the fearless goat inside himself in time to rescue little Edmund?

Performed by the wonderfully dynamic and hugely engaging musicians from Ensemble 360, this concert is a great introduction to live music for early years and KS1 children. It’s full of wit, invention, songs and actions, and plenty of opportunities to join in.

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

A CELEBRATION OF CZECH MUSIC

Ensemble 360

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 17 March 2025, 7.30pm

Past Event

Home› What's on› A CELEBRATION OF CZECH MUSIC

HAAS Oboe Suite Op.17 (16′)
JANÁČEK In the Mists (15′)
HAAS Wind Quinet Op.10 (14′)
JANÁČEK Mládi (19′)

Janáček’s beloved Mládí (‘Youth’) was written towards the end of his life as a nostalgic celebration of memories of his youth, drawing on his early writing. Receiving its premiere performances in autumn 1924, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of this iconic piece for wind, featuring the bass clarinet alongside a regular wind quintet line-up of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Also featured in this concert is Janacek’s expressive masterpiece for solo piano ‘In the Mists’ and two works from wind and piano by his most illustrious student, Pavel Haas.

Pavel Haas who was born in 1899, was a Jewish composer from Czechoslovakia, who had his promising career tragically cut short when he was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. His music, once forgotten, is gradually gaining recognition, thanks to dedicated efforts by surviving colleagues and scholars. Haas was a student of Leoš Janáček, and his music reflects the influence of Moravian folk tunes and Jewish liturgical music. One of his most significant works, the Wind Quintet (1929), showcases his distinct style, blending rhythmic complexity and folk influences, much like his teacher Janáček’s Mládí.

Written on the eve of the tumult of the 1930s and infused with the bleakness and forboding of the period, it remained largely unknown for decades, with nearly all copies lost during World War II. However, Czech musicologist Lubomír Peduzzi, a former student of Haas, discovered the manuscript in the Moravian Museum in Brno. His 1991 edition of the work has helped the piece find its place alongside other important wind quintets of the interwar period, such as those by Nielsen, Schoenberg, and Hindemith.

The Wind Quintet is a four-movement work characterized by its emotional depth and modal melodies. The first movement, Preludio, begins with a folk-like tune, while the second, Pregheira (“Prayer”), conveys a heartfelt spiritual yearning. The third movement, Ballo Eccentrico, is a lively, quirky dance, and the final movement, rooted in Moravian folk music, ends with an expansive, triumphant chord. Despite its predominantly minor tonality, the work is varied in mood, alternating between seriousness and cheerfulness, much like Janáček’s compositions.

Haas’ music, though overshadowed by the atrocities of the Holocaust, is now recognized as a significant contribution to 20th-century chamber music. His Wind Quintet, in particular, stands as a powerful and original work, blending folk traditions with modern compositional techniques, and is gradually earning its place in the standard repertoire.

Janáček composed Mládí in July 1924 (the month of his 70th birthday) at his rural retreat in the village of Hukvaldy. He described it to Kamila Stösslová as ‘a sort of memoir of youth’, and a newspaper article in December 1924 described the programme of the suite as follows: ‘In the first movement, [Janáček] remembers his childhood at school in Hukvaldy, in the second the sad scenes of parting with his mother at the station in Brno, in the third in 1866 as a chorister when the Prussians were in Brno; the concluding movement is a courageous leap into life.’ Intended as a nostalgic evocation of Janáček’s youth (his original title was Mladý život – Young Life) it is a typically quirky and ebullient product of his incredibly productive old age. It was first performed in Brno on 24 October 1924, followed a month later by a performance in Prague. Janáček also heard the work during his only visit to England, at a concert in the Wigmore Hall on 6 May 1926 when it was played by British musicians including Leon Goossens and Aubrey Brain.

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

PIANO FAVOURITES

Kathryn Stott

The Guildhall, Portsmouth

Monday 21 October 2024, 7.30pm

Past Event

Home› What's on› PIANO FAVOURITES

BACH Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C BWV846 (5′)
L BOULANGER Théme et Variations (9′)
FAURÉ Barcarolle No.4 in A Flat Op.44 (4′)
RAVEL Jeux d’eau (5′)
GRIEG Wedding Day at Troldhaugen Op. 65 No. 6 (6′)
PIAZZOLLA (arr. YAMAMOTO) Milonga (5′)
SHOSTAKOVICH Prelude & Fegue No. 24 in D minor Op.87 (12′)
FITKIN Scent (4′)
RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN (arr. HOUGH) ‘My Favourite Things’ (3′)
SHAW Gustave Le Gray (11′)
CHOPIN Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4 in A minor (4′)
GRAINGER Molly on the Shore (4′)
VINE Short Story (3′)
FITKIN Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (8′)

Acclaimed pianist Kathryn Stott brings a programme of ‘musical postcards’ to Portsmouth as part of her farewell tour. As Kathy draws her performing career to a close, she performs an eclectic programme spanning four centuries of music, showcasing her diverse musical loves and friendships.

Opening with exquisite Bach and concluding with a brand-new farewell commission, via a Scandinavian wedding celebration from Grieg, the spirit of Broadway and a masterful Chopin Mazurka, this promises to be a whirlwind tour through a unique musical career from a captivating performer much-loved across the world.

When Kathryn Stott performed this programme at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2024, it was billed as a concert of ‘Musical Postcards’. That’s a good description of a recital which explores the huge range of her repertoire, starting with the first prelude and fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and ending with a brand-new piece by Graham Fitkin which was given its world premiere at the Aldeburgh concert on 21 June. Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) composed her Thème et variations in 1914 but the work remained unknown until its rediscovery led to its first performance (and publication) in 1993. The theme (marked ‘avec douleur, mais noble’) is presented without accompaniment and eight variations follow, each treating the theme (or part of it) in imaginative ways that are entirely characteristic of Boulanger.

Caroline Potter has noted that the work was modelled on the Thème et variations, Op. 73 by Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) who was Boulanger’s teacher and a family friend. Fauré’s Barcarolle No. 4, Op. 44, was composed in 1886 and dedicated to Mme Ernest Chausson. Quietly poetic in mood, it is full of the rich harmonic surprises and fluid melodies that are so typical of Fauré’s music. Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was one of Fauré’s most imaginative pupils and he wrote Jeux d’eau – among the most evocative and brilliant of all ‘water’ pieces for piano – in 1901, with a dedication ‘à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré’.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) composed Wedding Day at Troldhaugen to celebrate his silver wedding anniversary with his wife Nina in 1896 and it was included in Book VIII of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces the following year, when it acquired its definitive title (Grieg has originally called it ‘The well-wishers are coming’). The Argentine Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), creator of the nuevo tango which fused traditional tango with elements of jazz and classical styles, composed Milonga del Ángel in 1965, and it is heard here in a later piano transcription by the Japanese pianist Kyoko Yamamoto. Inspired by a visit to Leipzig in 1950 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) modelled his Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, even including some quotations as well as following Bach’s design of preludes and fugues in each of the major and minor keys. Completed on 23 February 1951, the D minor Prelude and Fugue ends the entire set with a stern prelude followed by a highly elaborate double fugue (which also includes allusions to Bach’s Art of Fugue) deploying a formidable array of contrapuntal techniques. The whole set was first performed in April and May 1951 at a private concert for the Soviet Union of Composers and heard in public in December 1952, played by Tatiana Nikolayeva, for whom the Preludes and Fugues had been composed.

Graham Fitikin (b. 1963) composed Scent in 2007, originally for the harpist Ruth Wall. The pianist Stephen Hough (b. 1961) included his hugely entertaining and ingenious transcription of ‘My Favorite Things’ from The Sound of Music by Richard Rodgers (1902–79) on one of his earliest recital discs, bringing Lisztian pyrotechnics to Broadway. When Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) composed Gustave Le Gray in 2012, she was inspired by Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4 – one of his most harmonically inventive earlier pieces – and included direct references to it in her own work. Shaw herself described it as ‘a multi-layered portrait of Op. 17 No. 4 using some of Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged together with my own.’ The original Mazurka by Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49) was first published in Paris in 1834. It is a spellbinding kind of dance poem, full of ambiguity and quiet longing, some astonishingly daring harmonies and a trajectory which begins and ends in uncertain silence. Molly on the Shore by the Australian Percy Grainger (1882–1961) was based on two traditional Irish reels and written in 1907 as a birthday present for Grainger’s mother. He first composed it for strings, then made an orchestral version in 1914 and the present piano transcription in 1918. He later made further versions for military band (1920) and for two pianos (1947).

Carl Vine (b. 1954) is another Australian composer, and his Anne Landa Preludes were written in 2006 in memory of Anne Landa (who died in 2002 at the age of 55), particularly her passionate encouragement of young Australian pianists. The first of the preludes is ‘Short Story’ described by Vine as follows: ‘The prelude contains a story. But the drama emerges through its own internal logic rather than from a specific series of predetermined events’. Graham Fitkin composed Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly specifically for Kathryn Stott’s farewell recitals, taking his title from the euphemism used by Elon Musk’s SpaceX when its rockets blew up in 2015 and 2023 (though the phrase probably goes back to the 1960s when NASA used similar terminology to describe earlier explosions). As Stott said in a recent interview, ‘My one request to Graham was, this will be the last notes I play in public, so keep that in mind!’

About the Artists

Kathryn Stott

Kathryn Stott is internationally recognised as one of Britain’s most versatile and imaginative musicians and among today’s most engaging pianists. As well as appearing on major international concert platforms in recitals as a soloist, she is in demand for a wide variety of chamber music alliances, playing with some of the world’s leading instrumentalists. Kathryn has also directed several distinctive concert series and festivals and has developed an extensive and exceptionally varied catalogue of recordings. Read more.

SOUNDS OF NOW: BRIDGE ENSEMBLE

Bridge Ensemble

The Guildhall Lens Studio, Portsmouth

Wednesday 11 December 2024, 7.30pm

Past Event

Home› What's on› SOUNDS OF NOW: BRIDGE ENSEMBLE

A programme of new music for flute, clarinet, oboe, horn and bassoon from Music in the Round’s Bridge Ensemble.

SIGURD BERGE Horn-lokk (6′)
WISSAM BOUSTANY And the Wind Whispered for flute (7′)
JUDTH WEIR Mountain Airs (4′)
VALERIE COLEMAN Umoja (4′)
ARTURO MARQUEZ Danza de Mediodia (10′)
VALERIE COLEMAN Red Clay & Mississippi Delta (6′)
OLA AKINDIPE Èkó Scenes (10′)

Opening with Sigurd Berge’s haunting work for solo horn, including Èkó Scenes, a brand new Afrobeat-inspired work by the group’s clarinettist Olá Akindipe, and concluding with US composer Valerie Coleman’s fusion of what she calls ‘blues dialect and charm of the south’, this is an accessible and eclectic tour through a world of new classical music.

SOUNDS OF NOW: HERMES EXPERIMENT

The Hermes Experiment

The Guildhall Lens Studio, Portsmouth

Thursday 17 April 2025, 7.30pm

Past Event

Home› What's on› SOUNDS OF NOW: HERMES EXPERIMENT

CÉCILE CHAMINADE(arr. SCHOFIELD) La Lune paresseuse (3’)
TOM COULT I Find Planets (6’)
CAROLINE SHAW (arr. DENHOLM-BLAIR) Plan & Elevation: I. The Ellipse (4’)
LISA ROBERTSON, new work (world premiere, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society) (7’)
LAURA MOODY Rilke Songs (movements I & III) (10’)
SOOSAN LOLAVAR Mâh Didam (6’)
ANNA MEREDITH (arr. SCHOFIELD) Fin like a flower (3’)
LILI BOULANGER (arr. SCHOFIELD) Reflets (3’)
KERRY ANDREW (arr. DENHOLM-BLAIR) Fruit Songs (8’)
ERROLLYN WALLEN (arr. WERNER), Tree (5’)
HANNAH PEEL (arr. PASHLEY), The Almond Tree (3’)
MISHA MULLOV-ABBADO The Linden Tree (6’)

The award-winning Hermes Experiment is one of the most exciting forces in contemporary music today. With their arresting stage presence and wildly imaginative programmes, they have been winning over audiences around the country with their effortless ability to bring music from the margins into the mainstream.

Fronted by the captivating singer Heloise Werner, this quartet of sensational musicians (soprano, harp, clarinet and double bass) were recent winners of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award. They perform works covering all styles of new music in today’s gloriously electric scene.

Presented in partnership with the Royal Over-Seas League.

Caroline Shaw

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo Yo Ma, and she has contributed music to films and tv series including Fleishman is in Trouble, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and Beyonce’s Homecoming. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Plan and Elevation

I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when traveling, and some of my favourite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan.

I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. “The Ellipse” considers the notion of infinite repetition (I won’t deny a tiny Kierkegaard influence here). One can walk around and around the stone path, beneath the trimmed hornbeams, as I often did as a way to clear my mind while writing.

Kerry Andrew

Kerry Andrew is a London-based musician, and author. Her debut novel, Swansong, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018 and her second SKIN in 2021. She made her short story debut on BBC Radio 4 in 2014 with One Swallow and was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award.

Kerry is the winner of four British Composer Awards and is best known for her experimental vocal, choral and music-theatre work, often based around themes of community, landscape and myth. She sings with Juice Vocal Ensemble and has released two albums with her band You Are Wolf: Hawk to the Hunting Gone (2014), a collection of avian folk-songs re-interpreted, and Keld (2018), inspired by freshwater folklore.

Fruit Songs

I mango
II plum
III blackberry
IV cherry
V apple

I never treat a poem as a ‘straight’ setting: ‘mango’ is fairly schizophrenic in nature, with sections of percussive phonetics interspersed with sung chunks of the whole text. ‘plum’ is simpler, only picking out ‘forgive me’ as a refrain. In ‘blackberry’, I chose an 11-note row, with 1 quaver pitch to a syllable, which is then deconsructed. ‘cherry’ examines a range of extra-vocal techniques using only the word ‘Oh!’, and has a more theatrical interplay between singer and guitarist. For ‘apple’, I stripped down the Drinkwater poem to what I saw as its essentials. Particular musical influences for these songs include Björk, Meredith Monk, Sheila Chandra, English folk, Japanese, West African and Indian music.

Hannah Peel

Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music

From her own solo albums to composing soundtracks like Game of Thrones: The last Watch, or to orchestrating and conducting for artists like Paul Weller, her work is ambitious, forward-looking, always adapting and re-inventing new genres and hybrid musical forms

Hannah is a regular weekly broadcaster for BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks

The Almond Tree

This is a track from Hannah Peel’s 2011 debut album The Broken Wave, which she described as a collection of songs covering themes ranging from “joy and hope of falling in love through to the pain and loss of betrayal.” In 2018 The Almond Tree featured in the opening episode of the Channel 4 / Netflix series Kiss Me First.

Hannah performing The Almond Tree in 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piZCfrpa9kE

Misha Mullov-Abbado

Award-winning, London-based jazz bass player, composer and arranger Misha Mullov-Abbado is a musician who combines great imagination with raw talent and a clear vision. A BBC New Generation Artist and with three critically acclaimed albums on Edition Records under his name, his most recent offering Dream Circus showcases his ‘melodic gift’ (John Fordham, The Guardian) and ability to masterfully combine beautifully-crafted compositions with free-spirited improvisation. Written over a three-year period the album, produced by fellow Edition Records bassist and bandleader Jasper Høiby (Phronesis), marks the arrival of an artist who has been on a voyage of self-discovery.

His aforementioned collective features some of the most exhilarating and sought-after young musicians in London and was formed during Misha’s final year at Royal Academy of Music. An experienced band-leader and versatile sideman, Misha regularly performs all over the UK and around the world, including at top London venues such as Ronnie Scott’s, the Vortex, King’s Place and Royal Albert Hall. His vast musical travels have led him to work alongside inspiring musicians

such as Alice Zawadzki, Dave O’Higgins, Tim Garland, Viktoria Mullova, Enzo Zirilli, Sam Lee, Rob Luft, Paul Clarvis, Stan Sulzmann and Nessi Gomes.

A prolific composer and arranger in his own right, Misha embraces his jazz, classical, pop and folk influences and writes for a variety of jazz groups, as well as various classical soloists and ensembles. Commissions include work with the Hermes Experiment, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, LSSO, Hill Quartet, Pelleas Ensemble, NW Live Arts and BBC Radio 3, the latter of which commissioned his cello concerto which was premiered at London’s Southbank Centre by Matthew Barley and the BBC Concert Orchestra.

It’s only a matter of time before Misha seals his place on the international scene at the forefront of a new generation of European creative Jazz musicians.

The Linden Tree (2015)

Misha Mullov-Abbado’s The Linden Tree retains the familiar folksong-like lyrics but crafts a new melody and accompaniment. The flowing tune stays true to the bittersweet melancholy of the original, but the score also introduces a range of jazz and swing elements into the instrumental accompaniment, from a strolling pizzicato bass to the occasional quasiimprovisatory solo from the clarinet.

About the Artists

The Hermes Experiment

Winners of the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2021 and the Royal Over-Seas League Mixed Ensemble Competition 2019, The Hermes Experiment is one of the UK’s leading young contemporary music ensembles. Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments (harp, clarinet, voice and double bass), The Hermes Experiment regularly commissions new works, as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. They have commissioned over 60 composers at various stages of their careers. They have released two albums on Delphian Records – HERE WE ARE and SONG – both to critical acclaim. Read their full bio here.

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“The musicians did a wonderful job of introducing the young audience to enjoyment of the theatre, live music and engaging story-telling. Proof of their success [were] the lines of excited children coming up to meet the musicians who had gathered in the foyer with their instruments.”

The Yorkshire Post (on a previous Music in the Round storybook concert)

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

About the Artists

Jasdeep Singh Degun

Ensemble 360

PARRY Richard Reed, Quartet for Heart & Breath

WHITLEY Kate, Mew Settings

TAVENER John, The World

HAMILTON Jamie, A Mouth in Search of a Voice: Part 1

MONK Meredith, Stringsongs

MILLER Cassandra, Thanksong

About the Artists

Phaedra Ensemble

Lotte Betts-Dean

HOLST Imogen, Phantasy String Quartet

BRITTEN Benjamin, Three Divertimenti for String Quartet

HOLBROOKE Joseph, Eilean Shona for Clarinet and String Quartet

HOWELLS HERBERT, Phantasy String Quartet, Op.25

PURCELL Henry, Three-Part Fantasias

HARRISON PAMELA, Clarinet Quintet

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Ralph, The Lark Ascending

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

SAARIAHO Kaija, Terra Memoria

GESUALDO Carlo, Moro, lasso, al mio duolo

MUSSORGSKY Modest, Songs and Dances of Death

LISZT Franz, Via Crucis

SCHUBERT Franz, String Quartet in D minor ‘Death and the Maiden’

About the Artists

Dudok Quartet

HAYDN Joseph, Quartet in B flat Op.33 No.4

JANÁČEK Leoš, String Quartet No.2 “Intimate Letters”

BEETHOVEN Ludwig van, String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131

About the Artists

Fibonacci Quartet

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

Elinor Moran

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

HAAS Pavel, Wind Quintet Op.10

JANÁČEK Leoš, Mládí

About the Artists

Ensemble 360

PIANO FAVOURITES

About the Artists

Kathryn Stott

SHAW Caroline, The Ellipse from Plan and Elevation

ANDREW Kerry, Fruit Songs

PEEL Hannah, The Almond Tree

MULLOV-ABBADO Misha, The Linden Tree

About the Artists

The Hermes Experiment