Tim Horton performs his own spellbinding early morning concert, returning the Goldberg Variations to their original keyboard form. Once again ringing out among the dawn chorus, in the atmospheric hidden gem of Samuel Worth Chapel, the magnificent intricacy of these 32 variations will set the tone for the final day of the Festival. In the hands of Tim Horton, and in the intimacy of this very special venue, this promises to breathe new life into what is rightly one of the best-loved works of the solo piano repertoire.
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GOLDBERG: BACH AT BREAKFAST
Ensemble 360
Samuel Worth Chapel, Sheffield
Sunday 18 May 2025, 7.30am
Tickets: £17 £10 UC, PIP & DLA £5 Students & Under 35s
A breakfast concert of Bach’s hugely popular Goldberg Variations, at Samuel Worth Chapel. Intricate counterpoint and life-affirming spirituality are the hallmarks of this most intimate of works presented in a breathtaking, conversational arrangement for violin, viola and cello. Legend has it, these Variations were written for a sleepless Count: this early start will live long in your dreams.
Our sunrise concerts at the sensitively restored Grade-II* listed chapel always sell out, so for their 20th anniversary, Ensemble 360 wanted to give more people a chance to join them for a special early morning experience.
This year, the Sunrise concert will be immediately repeated with the same programme, so you can choose to join us for Bach at dawn or Bach at breakfast!
Save 20% when you book for 10 or more Music in the Round concerts in one transaction. Save 10% when you book for 5 or more Music in the Round concerts in one transaction. Find out more.
GOLDBERG: BACH AT DAWN
Ensemble 360
Samuel Worth Chapel, Sheffield
Sunday 18 May 2025, 5.00am
Tickets: £17 £10 UC, PIP & DLA £5 Students & Under 35s
As the day breaks and birdsong surrounds Samuel Worth Chapel, Bach’s hugely popular Goldberg Variations, will greet the dawn. Intricate counterpoint and life-affirming spirituality are the hallmarks of this most intimate of works presented in a breathtaking, conversational arrangement for violin, viola and cello. Legend has it these Variations were written for a sleepless Count: this early start will live long in your dreams.
Our sunrise concerts at the sensitively restored Grade-II* listed chapel always sell out, so for their 20th anniversary, Ensemble 360 wanted to give more people a chance to join them for a special early morning experience.
This year, the Sunrise concert will be immediately repeated with the same programme, so you can choose to join us for Bach at dawn or Bach at breakfast!
Save 20% when you book for 10 or more Music in the Round concerts in one transaction.
Save 10% when you book for 5 or more Music in the Round concerts in one transaction. Find out more.
SUNRISE
Ensemble 360
Samuel Worth Chapel, Sheffield
Sunday 19 May 2024, 5.00am
Tickets £21 £14 UC, DLA or PIP £5 Under 35s & Students
Programme includes: BARBER Summer Music (12’) MESSIAEN Appel interstellaire (6’) NIELSEN Wind Quintet (mvt 1) (9’) MILHAUD La Cheminée du roi René (extracts) (6’)
No interval
Back by popular demand! The wind players of Ensemble 360 will perform a selection of music to accompany the rising sun, alongside the dawn chorus of singing birds. Featuring the blues-inflected Summer Music by Samuel Barber, the technical fireworks of Messiaen’s interstellar horn-calls (recorded above the Hope Valley by Naomi Atherton for our online festival in 2020), and music for wind inspired by nature, this promises to be an atmospheric morning of music in a unique setting.
Please note that there are limited spaces and early booking is recommended.
Save £s when you book for 5 Music in the Round concerts or more at the same time. Find out more here.
BARBER Samuel, Summer Music
In 1953, Samuel Barber was commissioned to write a new work for the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, the fee to be paid for not in the usual way but by contributions from the Detroit Symphony audience. Originally, he was asked for a septet (three wind, three strings and piano) but settled on the scoring for wind quintet after hearing performances and attending numerous rehearsals by the New York Wind Quintet who offered a great deal of technical advice about writing for this instrumental combination. In spite of this close collaboration, the first performance had been promised to Detroit and was given there by Detroit Symphony principals on 26 March 1956 when it was enthusiastically received, one local critic noting that the audience was delighted by ‘its mood of pastoral serenity.’ Following the premiere, Barber again worked with the New York Wind Quintet, making some cuts and putting Summer Music into its final shape. After performances in Boston and on a tour of South America, the New York ensemble played it at Carnegie Hall on 16 November 1956. Since then, the work has become established as cornerstone of the twentieth-century wind quintet repertoire. Cast in a single movement, the mood is mostly quiet and rhapsodic, and as for the title, Barber wrote that ‘it’s supposed to be evocative of summer – summer meaning languid, not killing mosquitoes.’
On 9 March 1971, Messiaen’s former pupil Jean-Pierre Guézec died at the age of thirty-six. At the Royan Festival a few weeks later, a musical ‘Tombeau’ was dedicated to his memory comprising pieces for solo instruments by composers such as Gilbert Amy, Betsy Jolas, Marius Constant and Iannis Xenakis. Messiaen’s piece was for solo horn and it was written within a few days of Guézec’s death (he noted its completion on 20 March). At the Royan concert it was played by Daniel Bourgue under the title found on the earliest manuscript: ‘Piece for horn, in memory of Jean-Pierre Guézec’. Three years later, with the new title Appel interstellaire, it became the sixth movement of Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux étoiles, first performed in New York on 20 November 1974. While Messiaen subsequently insisted that he wanted the movement performed only as part of the larger work, its origins were as an independent solo. It makes extreme demands on the performer, requiring the use of extended techniques such as glissandos, strange, swirling oscillations, and howling sounds. The result is an astonishing piece of virtuoso writing, composed as a highly personal response to the tragedy of Guézec’s early death.
Nielsen composed his Wind Quintet in 1922 for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, whose Mozart playing had inspired him. As well as this work, Nielsen planned to write concertos for each of the members of the group but only completed those for flute and clarinet. He wrote it during a three-month stay in Gothenburg, immediately after completing the Fifth Symphony. In a letter to a friend he wrote that ‘the externals are very modest, but the technicalities are for that reason all the more difficult’, and he told he wife that it he was ‘greatly amused’ by the challenge. In his is own programme note on the work, Nielsen wrote:
‘The quintet for winds is one of the composer’s latest works, in which he has attempted to render the characters of the various instruments. At one moment they are all talking at once, at another they are quite alone. The work consists of three movements: a) Allegro, b) Minuet and c) Prelude – Theme with Variations. The theme for these variations is the melody for one of Nielsen’s spiritual songs, which has here been made the basis of a set of variations, now merry and quirky, now elegiac and serious, ending with the theme in all its simplicity and very quietly expressed.’
Nigel Simeone
MILHAUD Darius, La Cheminée du roi René (extracts)
Milhaud grew up in Aix-en-Provence, and was always proud of his Provençal heritage. It was also in Aix that “Le bon Roi René” (René of Anjou, 1409–1480) spent the last years of his life, a he’s celebrated with a handsome statue in the Place Forbin. La Cheminée du Roi René is a suite for wind quintet drawn from the music Milhaud composed for a film score. Each of the short movements is a charming depiction of Good King René’s court as they make their way to favourite spots in Provence. It includes stately dances (the Cortège, and ‘La Maousinglade’, a Sarabande), jugglers, jousting on the River Arc and hunting at Valabre. By the time Milhaud reworked the music he had fled France, occupied by the Nazis from June 1940, and settled at Mills College at Oakland. The first performance of this quintessentially French piece was thus given in California, by the San Francisco Woodwind Quintet, on 5 March 1941.
Singers of all ages and abilities come together for music-making and an informal performance.
Sing with us in the peaceful setting of Samuel Worth Chapel as we explore two pieces of beautiful music that meld histories together through time.
We’ll workshop English composer Tippett’s arrangement of Willis’ Steal Away and American composer Shruthi Rajasekar’s Jayjaykar! before an informal performance to friends and family at the end of the event (1pm-1.30pm).
Sheffield Chamber Choir’s Robert Webb will lead us in performing this beautiful music which together references choral traditions from both England and India while providing perspectives from two very different places and points in history. Shruthi Rajasekar will also be zapping in from the US during the day and has recorded insights about her music especially for you. We’ll be sharing this with you during the break.
Either learn by ear or from provided notation. This event is for both beginners and experienced singers alike (although some experience of singing in a choir will be helpful).
Recordings of both pieces can be found here: https://linktr.ee/mitr_participation and if you’d like a chat before signing up, please email ellen@musicintheround.co.uk
by RayMesh Photography
SUNRISE
Ensemble 360
Samuel Worth Chapel, Sheffield
Sunday 15 May 2022, 5.15am
Tickets: £20
£14 Disabled & Unemployed
£8 Students & Under 35s
(includes a hot drink and pastry)
At weekends there’s free parking on both Montague Street and Cemetery Road. Vehicle access to the Chapel is reserved for audience members with mobility issues.
Access to the Chapel is from Montague Street. Doors will open and Music in the Round stewards will be available to guide audience members to the Chapel from 5.05am. The path to the Chapel, 2 mins walk on a flat good surface, will be well lit, but staff will also be on hand along the pathway.
**
Alphorn transcriptions
CASALS Song of the Birds (4′) JS BACH Chaconne from Partita No.2 in D minor BWV1004 (15’) NISHIMURA Fantasia on Song of the Birds (6’) HAYDN String Quartet Op.76 No.4 ‘Sunrise’ (22’) DAVIES Yoik (8′)
Distant horn calls herald the rising sun as musicians from Ensemble 360 salute the dawn in this programme of music inspired by the natural world.
As the darkness gradually recedes and the beautiful Samuel Worth Chapel is flooded with light, the musicians complement the arrival of dawn with performances including the tender ‘Song of the Birds’, a Catalan folksong made famous by the great cellist Pablo Casals. Other treats include Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ for solo violin, a musical force of nature, and Haydn’s inventive ‘Sunrise’ Quartet. Sunday morning will never have sounded so good.
Capacity is limited for this event and early booking is advised. Coffee and pastries included.
CASALS Pablo, Song of the Birds (arr. Catalan traditional song)
The Catalan Christmas carol El cant dels ocells tells of birds singing with joy on hearing the news of the birth of Jesus. Pablo Casals made his cello arrangement after leaving Spain in protest at Franco’s dictatorship in 1939. He played it in almost all his concerts thereafter, including a memorable performance for President John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1961. The song became a musical emblem of Casals’s Catalan homeland, and his self-imposed exile. The great cellist himself made it clear that his reasons for making this arrangement were both musical and political, expressing the hope that ‘these sounds may be like a gentle echo of the nostalgia we feel for Catalonia. These sentiments must make us all work together, with the hope of a peaceful future, when Catalonia will once again be Catalonia.’
Notes by Nigel Simeone, 2022
BACH Johann Sebastian, Chaconne from Partita No.2 in D minor BWV1004
‘On one stave, for a small instrument, Bach writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’ This is how Johannes Brahms described Bach’s gigantic Chaconne to his friend Clara Schumann. It is the last movement of Bach’s D minor Partita, composed in about 1720. Probably the greatest single movement ever written for unaccompanied violin, it is an extended set of variations on a short, four-bar idea announced at the start. Bach uses all his ingenuity to create a structure in which unity (the basic theme) and diversity (the astonishingly imaginative variations) are held in perfect balance over a long (256-bar) span. The outer sections are in D minor, while Bach provides tonal variety by modulating to D major for the central section. As Brahms suggested, the result is quite simply one of the marvels of Baroque music.
Nigel Simeone, 2022
NISHIMURA Akira, Fantasia on Song of the Birds
The Song of the Birds, played by Pablo Casals (1876-1973) in 1971, was based on a haunting and melancholy folk tune of his native Catalonia. Casals had experienced the horrors of both world wars, and this piece embodied the cello virtuoso’s prayers for peace. When performing it before the United Nations General Assembly toward the end of his life, he stood up and said, “Birds in Catalonia go singing: Peace, peace, peace.” I remember watching a video recording of this scene.
It might be more appropriate to call the piece this time a fantasia based on The Song of the Birds, rather than its arrangement. I wrote it freely, trying to capture the feelings and emotions of Casals, while imagining its performance by Japanese viola player Nobuko Imai. The original piece was written in A minor, but I chose C minor as its principal key to make the most of the viola’s open strings. Casals was one of the most important artists to Mr. Haruhiko Hagimoto; because I have dedicated this short piece to Mr. Hagimoto, and H.H. are his initials, the piece ends with a prolonged H note.
Allegro con spirito
Adagio
Menuetto. Allegro
Finale. Allegro, ma non troppo
This quartet was nicknamed the ‘Sunrise’ on account of its opening idea, an ascending theme on the first violin, heard over sustained chords. It was completed in 1797, and published as the fourth in what was to be Haydn’s last set of six quartets. A strongly contrasting idea in semiquavers is punctuated by short, rhythmic chords. Throughout the movement, Haydn cuts between these two sharply characterized themes, often returning to the ‘sunrise’ idea in ingenious ways. For instance, quite near the start, the theme is heard on the cello, beneath long chords in the upper strings, and this time it heads in a new direction – descending rather than ascending. The variety of texture in this movement is a constant source of delight – a composer at the height of his powers in a genre which he had not only pioneered but also developed to new expressive heights. The slow movement is reflective and unusually free in terms of structure: here the fantasia-like form seems to emerge as a natural consequence of the musical ideas. The Minuet comes as a charming contrast, until the rather austere Trio section where the violins present a serpentine tune, full of chromatic twists, over a drone in the lower strings. The finale is based on a theme that resembles a folk-song, and it has been suggested Haydn may have discovered this tune during his second visit to London in 1795. For the most part, the mood of this movement is jovial apart from a darker central section where the tune is presented in B flat minor. The work ends back in the major, closing with two unusually full double- and triple-stopped chords.
Tansy and I have been collaborating on nature and the horn for many years. A horn player herself, Tansy really understands the primal connection the sound of the horn stimulates in the deepest layers of our shared human experience. This aspect of her oeuvre fascinates me and I feel it strongly when playing “Yoik”. The haunting lyricism interspersed with a special playing technique sounding like the resonance found in an icy wind of distant memory is just wonderful. Tansy wrote the following about the piece:
A Yoik is not merely a description; it attempts to capture its subject in its entirety: it’s like a holographic, multi-dimensional living image, a replica, not just a flat photograph or simple visual memory. It is not about something, it is that something. It does not begin and it does not end.
A Yoik is not a song in the sense that it is about something. The melody is closely connected to the referential object in an indissoluble relationship. Linguistically this is expressed through the fact that one does not yoik about somebody or something, there is a direct connection; one yoiks something or someone.
The structure of a Yoik follows the Sami worldview of “No beginning, no end”. Sami see the world as following the circular patterns of nature. Living in a whited-out world of snow, often without horizon; perceptions of space, depth, time and environment are all closely-knit mysteries, to which the culture – and the Yoik – are intrinsically connected.
The name Christine Chapman is transmuted here – into the melody of my Yoik for Horn – so this is a yoik for and of her. The piece was composed by the river Medway in Kent, England. It is also a Yoik for that river, in the early morning.
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