BBC Radio 3 broadcast

Our Aldeburgh Festival concert with Pierre-Laurent Aimard will be broadcast tonight, Monday, at 19.00 on BBC Radio 3.

New partnership with the Institute for Manufacturing

With our office being based in Cambridge we have a range of activity and contacts with the University and its colleges: the Music Faculty, King's, St John's, Trinity, Jesus, Queens' and Corpus, and the Judge Business School are all regular partners. But we were recently approached by the Institute for Manufacturing , and subsequently worked with four MPhil students on various business development research projects. They came along to our concert with Pierre-Laurent Aimard last week and took the chance to meet some of our players.

The Traveller

Local TV news coverage in Salisbury at the time of the premiere of The Traveller by Alec Roth and Vikram Seth can be seen here (you might need to load the clip and then play it again). The next performance is at the Lichfield Festival on 8 July.

The Iron Cockerel Sings

Polina Leschenko joins us at Aldeburgh on Monday evening for a performance of John Woolrich's The Iron Cockerel Sings. A young, Russian-born pianist, now living in Brussels, Polina combines a phenomenal technique with deep sensitivity and abundant imagination. Her busy career combines concerti, recitals and chamber music. A regular visitor to the Hallé Orchestra, she recently took part in their 150th Birthday Concert and created a sensation with her peformance. David Fanning wrote in The Daily Telegraph, 'Equally breathtaking ... was the young Russian pianist Polina Leschenko, who produced a dazzling firework display in the Weber Konzertstück.' She will tour South America tour with the orchestra next season. Leschenko has appeared in recital at the Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Vienna Konzerthaus, and returns to the Konzerthaus and Concertgebouw next season. Leschenko is a passionate chamber musician and her regular partners include Christian Poltéra, Heinrich Schiff, Priya Mitchell, Alexander Sitkovetsky and Patricia Kopatchinskaya.

Lichfield Festival

There is a further chance to hear our Traveller project - with Mark Padmore, and featuring the new work by Alec Roth to Vikram Seth texts - at the Lichfield Festival on 8 July. You might also like to read the festival director's blog. There are some great links in his 19 June entry to material on and about Vikram Seth, including some video interviews.

The air buzzed.....

Geoff Brown in The Times on our concert at Aldeburgh last weekend: 'On Saturday night at the Maltings the air buzzed. There was scarcely a spare seat. For this Britten Sinfonia concert gave us a tantalising preview of the Aldeburgh Festival's future under its next artistic director, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Not for him, or Britten Sinfonia, a concert shaped like a string of sausages. Instead we were taken on a questing journey. Primed by the restless imagination of Haydn (Symphony No 22), we leapt into gnomic 20th-century miniatures, adrift in space and time. Mysterious slivers of György Kurtág followed expressionist slices of Schoenberg. Webern's Op 5 pieces, arranged for string orchestra, muddied progress a bit. But nothing stopped Ives's The Unanswered Question sounding thrillingly strange.'

You can hear the same programme in Cambridge tonight. Tickets from 01223 357851

Cello doubling harmonium

The difference between festival concerts and other concerts is partly the collegiality of performers, composers and creative teams engendered by the context, all working together in one place over a period of time. Only at a festival such as Aldeburgh would two eminent pianists perform on the celeste in the same concert and a front-desk cellist double on harmonium. Modest moments in themselves, perhaps, but indicative of the kind of concert programme which integrates the performers fully, enabling the compelling sequence of Webern, Schoenberg, Kurtag and Ives at the centre of our concert on Friday with Pierre-Laurent Aimard to make maximum impact. We await the view from the packed press gallery, but the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves. You can hear this programme again on Thursday in Cambridge (still a few tickets available as of today) or catch the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the Aldeburgh concert on 26 June: I'll put the links on the blog nearer the time.
And thence on Sunday morning to Aldeburgh Church where our string principals were playing in a liturgical performance of Schubert's Mass in G (D.167), with a Mozart Epistle Sonata included for good measure. This service will be on Radio 4 on Sunday 29 June: again, more details later.