Midlands Classical Music Making

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY SHARES A QUESTIONNAIRE PUT OUT TO THE STAFF OF A MAJOR APPLICANT TO THE ARTS COUNCIL OF ENGLAND Question Title 1. What category of staff are you in? Specialist Staff - refers to directors, producers, artistic directors, educational, marketing and audience development staff Artists/Musicians/Composers Other staff - administrative and technical staff Question Title 2. Please select your gender identity: Female (including trans women) Male (including trans men) Non-binary (e.g. androgyne) Prefer not to say Question Title 3. Is your gender identity different to the sex you were assigned at birth? Yes No Prefer not to say Question Title 4. Please select your sexual orientation: Bisexual Gay Man Gay Woman/L...

NORMAN STINCHCOMBE SAVOURS THE LANDSCAPE IN ULSTER, VENETO AND BUENOS AIRES HARTY: Rudge / Glynn (Somm Recordings SOMMCD 0616) ★★★★ Fancy a sojourn in the Celtic twilight with its romantically windswept shores, love-lorn maidens, merry fiddlers and a distant view of the blue hills of Antrim? If so then this collection of twenty-three songs by Anglo-Irish composer Sir Hamilton Harty – sixteen of which are premiere recordings – will pleasantly while away a long summer evening. The British mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge has a powerful and flexible voice, able to command our attention at the doom-laden opening of Sea Wrack but refine it down for the ambiguous misty ending as she wonders whether the wrecked boat will eventually drift ashore. There's lightness too in the jolly Fiddler of Dooney and the easy-paced Scythe Song with Christopher Glynn's strumming piano. Harty was also an excellent accompanist and composer of piano miniatures, two of which, Idyll and Arlequin and...

A NEW HAYDN CD DELIGHTS NORMAN STINCHCOMBE, MOZART DISAPPOINTS HAYDN: Dudok Quartet (Resonus Classics RES10262) ★★★★★ Haydn's later string quartets have eclipsed the Op.20 set from 1772 but, as the booklet to this second disc in the Dudok's survey says, their importance in the history of classical music "can hardly be overestimated". Here Haydn liberates the viola and cello from their subordinate roles, achieving Goethe's ideal of a four-sided musical conversation. And with what diversity – music for church, court and folk are re-contextualized – such wit and what larks! No.4 in D major begins with the expected allegro which then unexpectedly becomes a theme and variations. Listen to the young Dutch quartet's joie de vivre in the miniature gypsy minuet and try no to smile in the madcap whirligig scherzando. The Dudok's variety of tone and colour brings out the solemnity of No.6's fugal finale while the lighter No.1's Affettuoso et s...