Mark Padmore and Andrew West: 2 September 2012 concert

2 September 2012: Mark Padmore and Andrew West

Mark Padmore: photo Marco Borggreve

The performers

Mark Padmore tenor and Andrew West piano

Background

Song recitals are relatively rare at Cratfield; the last was in 2007 with Andrew West at the piano (who first performed at Cratfield as long ago as 1997), when David Soar bass gave a programme of English song.

Andrew West received the inaugural Gerald Moore Award for Accompanists, and for several years acted as official accompanist to the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. His concerts with Mark Padmore have included Mark’s debut Wigmore Hall recital, repeated at the Frick Collection in New York, and performances of Henze’s Six Songs from the Arabian at Wigmore Hall, Cité de la Musique and the Vienna Konzerthaus. He is an artistic director of the Nuremberg Chamber Music Festival, which celebrated its tenth season in 2011.

From early musical beginnings on the piano and clarinet, Mark Padmore’s voice gradually became his instrument, as choral scholar at King’s College Cambridge, Lay Vicar at Westminster Abbey and member of the Hilliard Ensemble. He is now at the peak of his powers as a singer, with lieder and solo appearances in concert halls across the world. His recent recordings of Schubert song-cycles (with Paul Lewis piano) quickly arrived at the very top of critics’ listings; and his work at Snape for Aldeburgh Music in 2011 included directing the Bach St John Passion with young singers and the Britten-Pears Baroque Orchestra, in which he also sang the Evangelist. He performed in the semi-staged version of Winterreise at Snape in 2009, interspersed with readings of texts by Samuel Beckett, with Andrew at the piano.

Andrew West

For more details, click here to go to Mark’s own website; and here for a page about Andrew from the Oxford Lieder website.

Playing at Cratfield

The concert is at 3pm on Sunday 2 September 2012.

Concert programme

Schubert, A selection of late songs [details tbc]

INTERVAL

Thomas Larcher (1963-), ‘A Padmore Cycle’ (2011)

Tippett, The Heart’s Assurance (1951)

About the programme

Schubert songs remain the core of any recitalist’s repertoire; alongside the well-known song-cycles like Winterreise, Schubert left an extraordinarily rich collection of elegantly and inventively crafted individual songs, where words and music – including the all-important partnership with the piano – are inseparably and memorably fused. Mark Padmore plans to select a group of songs from late in the composer’s life as the first half of his concert at Cratfield. Thomas Larcher is a contemporary Austrian composer, whose new song-cycle was written for Mark, to words by two Austrian poets. Mark gave its first performances in 2011. Tippett dedicated his song-cycle The Heart’s Assurance, like his earlier Boyhood’s End, to Pears and Britten, who gave its first performance in 1951; Britten found the piano part very taxing (it was Noel Mewton-Wood who recorded the cycle with Pears). The words come from two poets, both killed in WWII: Alun Lewis and Sydney Keyes.

CDs

Mark now records for Harmonia Mundi Europe; recent CDs include a Dowland/Britten recital with Elizabeth Kenny lute and Craig Ogden guitar; a CD of Handel arias with the English Concert under Andrew Manze; two Britten song-cycles with Roger Vignoles piano; and Winterreise wth Paul Lewis.

Ticket availability (click here for the Tickets page)

£14.50: booking not yet open

£11: booking not yet open

£8: booking not yet open

Click here for a plan of the church, showing the location of seats at the different prices for 2012; the PDF file will either open in a new window or be downloaded to your computer, depending on your own browser settings or preferences.

Concerts at Cratfield