A postgraduate student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama specialising in early music, Emily Owen is a freelance soprano, singing with numerous ensembles. She deputises in churches around London and also manages the newly formed London Youth Choir. Her website is here.
On entering the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe Theatre, you feel like you are stepping back in time with its painted ceiling, cushioned benches (a modern luxury) and a candlelit bare stage.
Players from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightment play Schubert's Octet in F major alongside Lieder from 1824 sung by Roderick Williams, Mary Bevan, Robert Murray and Rozanna Madylus, accompanied by Sholto Kynoch.
It is a wonderful thing to hear the full range and colour of a symphony orchestra used to its full effect during the course of an evening's programme and tonight the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo showed the diversity, versatility and sheer joy which for me really brings the music to life.
A triumphant Elijah as Edward Gardner conducts the Blackheath Halls Chorus and Orchestra, joined by Matthew Rose, Ailish Tynan, Robert Murray and Louise Winter and young singers from Trinity Laban.
Somewhere between a concert and a scientific experiment, tonight’s Tales from Babel at the Royal Academy of Music was a fascinating study into the way we process text and language. Having been given a response handset when we entered the room, the first half of the concert was a rendition of a work by Christopher Fox which gave the concert it’s name; Tales from Babel.
Composed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is a monumental setting of the words of the Latin Mass, interspersed with the poignant poetry of Wilfred Owen.
With a sparkling programme of concert classics, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Grzegorz Nowak and joined by renowned violinist Robert Davidovici were on fine form at the Cadogan Hall on Tuesday evening. They opened the programme with one of Berlioz’s operatic overtures – the only part to have survived in the current concert repertoire from his little known opera Benvenuto Cellini.
It is always a risk and a pleasure to programme some of the most well known works in the classical repertoire, and Italy’s Orchestra Mozart, joined by young Venezuelan conductor Diego Matheuz and pianist Maria João Pires, had some of the favourites on show in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday evening.They opened the concert with the effervescent overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
One hundred years after the première performance of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, perhaps one of the most controversial and infamous stage premières of all time, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Barbican Centre’s Total Immersion collaboration provided an all-round look at every aspect of the music, choreography and the première itself through a variety of events on Sunday, culminating
A hush fell over the auditorium as renowned concert pianist and long-standing friend of the LSO Mitsuko Uchida took her seat for Mozart’s Rondo in A minor for solo piano. A personal tribute to Sir Colin Davis, Uchida opened the Rondo with almost childlike simplicity, the delicate chromaticism of the opening theme played with simplicity and tenderness and a magical connection to the melodic line.
The singers and instrumentalists of Les Arts Florissants returned to the Barbican stage to rapturous applause and cheers after their performance on Saturday night. “Unfortunately there is simply no more music! We have finished the book!” said the tenor and director of tonight’s ensemble, Paul Agnew.
Celebrating their 40th anniversary year, The Tallis Scholars presented a programme of Renaissance polyphony centred around another anniversary – that of Carlo Gesualdo, the 400th anniversary of whose death falls this year. The first half of the concert was a complete performance of Gesualdo’s masterpiece, the Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday (1611).
Tonight’s programme was a feast of British music, with a Britten flavour, played by the strings of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, joined by virtuosic viola player Lawrence Power, whose prowess is bringing this much-neglected solo instrument into its own.We started with the beautiful Introduction and Allegro for string quartet and string orchestra, written by Edward Elgar in 1905.
The Royal Academy of Music tonight presented the fruits of their latest postgraduate opera course with two short operas representing opposite ends of the musical timeline.Purcell’s miniature three-act opera really needs no introduction.
Some of England’s greatest choral music dates from the period of political and religious upheaval during the late 15th to early 17th centuries, when composers were having to adapt to new monarchs and changes to the church service almost as frequently as they would have changed their shirts.
The culmination of the London Handel Festival is a much anticipated event, and tonight’s performance of Handel’s radiant composition L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was no exception. With an array of eminent musicians performing to a packed St George’s, Hanover Square, the mood was celebratory and the performance had a glow and energy that suited Handel’s mercurial music.
Centered around the later, lesser-known composers of art song, tonight’s programme started with a first half of melancholy Hugo Wolf Lieder. Both Schubert and Schumann wrote settings of Goethe’s unhappy Harfenspieler, but evidently Wolf was unsatisfied, as, on principle, he avoided setting texts which he thought had been successfully treated before.
Premièring a new touring programme at their home church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, early music vocal ensemble Stile Antico treated us to a concert centred around the music of the Hapsburg courts of the late 15th and 16th centuries.
