Summer Chamber Music Course

Summer Chamber Course Poster

University of Huddersfield C19 Chamber Music Workshop

In response to the tremendous success of the TCHIP chamber music course in 2017, the Huddersfield Centre for Performance Research (HuCPer) is hosting a similar event from the 28th of August through the 1st of September at the University of Huddersfield. The tutors will include Claire Holden, David Milson, Emily Worthington and George Kennaway, among others. Interested participants will need to apply by 31st March. All enquires should be directed to C19thSalon@hud.ac.uk. For more information please visit their Facebook Page.

hucper 19th salon flyer copy

 

TCHIP CHAMBER MUSIC COURSE RETROSPECTIVE

We are pleased to report that the Summer Chamber Music Course was a great success. Thirty-three participants from eleven different countries, including Australia, Hong Kong, Spain, Portugal, Bolivia, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Canada, the US (from California to New York), and throughout the UK, joined the TCHIP team and the course tutors here in Oxford for five days of exploration, discussion, experimentation and above all else, superb music-making.

The participants came from a wide variety of background and experiences from those just beginning post-graduate HIP programmes, to those who have been playing professionally in the industry for decades. Days were spent in chamber music rehearsals; in many cases, participants played in ensembles alongside tutors. Playing sessions were interspersed with round-table discussions in which all participants were encouraged to contribute with topics ranging the challenges of getting to grips with different historical wind instruments to concerns regarding today’s HIP training and institutions.

The course featured two public events: a piano lecture recital by Neal Peres da Costa, Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; and an ‘Open Evening’ at the end of the course, in which participants had the opportunity to share what they had been exploring in their rehearsals, as ‘work in progress’ with other course participants and members of the public. Both were very well attended and it was wonderful to see so much interest in the project.

We would like to thank the John Fell Fund and the Faculty of Music, whose generous support made the event possible. We are grateful to Andy Lamb and the Bate Collection as well as Bruno Guastalla and Oxford Violins for loaning instruments for the course, and St Peter’s College and Roger Allen for use of the St Peter’s College Chapel and the turn-of-the-century Blüthner piano.

The TCHIP team also extends a warm thank you to all of the tutors and participants who really helped make the TCHIP Chamber Music Course a ground-breaking event.

 

 

ABOUT THE COURSE

Transforming C19th HIP aims to bring world-leading scholars and performers together with the aim of providing professional players with new insights into historically evidenced expression, and a deeper understanding of the aesthetic context of the period. Much valuable scholarship on the performance practices of the 19th century already exists; but researchers have been critical of professional ‘period’ instrument performers, claiming that many supposedly historically informed performances of 19th-century repertoire currently reflect little of what is known about historical style. Although many period ensembles perform 19th-century repertoire, specialist conservatoire training still remains focused on teaching Baroque and Early-Classical performance practices. The TCHIP Summer Chamber Music Course responds to a number of requests by offering a 19th-century historical performance chamber music course for professionals and conservatoire post-graduates.

The course tutors include leading Historical Performance scholars from Conservatoires and Universities in Sydney, London, Birmingham, Huddersfield, Leeds, and Oxford. In addition to their research, the tutors perform as soloists, and members of leading period ensembles. The course will differ from conventional music courses in that the tutors will be fully participating members of the ensembles and the exploration of repertoire and expression will be research-led.

The course will be open to both individuals and existing ensembles, and will be open to string players, pianists, and wind players (including horn). At least two pianos, an 1830s Streicher with an Anglo-Viennese action, and a late 19th-century French piano by Erard will be available.

Transforming C19 HIP is particularly concerned with research into the pre-performance practices (rehearsal, preparation, planning, working with scores and parts) of the 19th Century. Each ensemble will rehearse two works – one from early in the century and one from later; and one of these works will be non-canonic (less well known), so that participants can gain a broader understanding of the aesthetic context. Wherever appropriate, the course will provide 19th-century early printed editions or high quality copies of library holdings, and participants will explore rehearsal practices of the period (e.g. not using scores for early 19th-century repertoire, approaches to annotating (marking) parts, approaches to personal interaction within ensembles). These rehearsal practices can be interesting because they allow players to listen, relate and respond in ways that differ from contemporary rehearsal techniques.

The Oxford Faculty of Music is home to the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments http://www.bate.ox.ac.uk and participants will have the opportunity to explore this unique collection of historical instruments with curator, Andy Lamb. It will be possible for participants to play—and perhaps even perform on—instruments from the collection.

The course will provide a supportive environment for participants to work with leading performer/scholars in an unusual and challenging way, and to embrace an aesthetic, techniques, and expression that they may not be familiar with from training, or professional experience.

For more information please contact c19hip@music.ox.ac.uk

Tutors

 

A number of researchers are starting to develop new approaches to historical performance research, andTransforming C19 HIP with its unique interdisciplinary approach and innovative research methodology, places Oxford at the forefront of this new wave of HIP research. The Summer Chamber Music Course will create a real opportunity for researchers and participants to explore artistic decision making and expression in 19th-century repertoire together.

 

Claire Holden

Claire is a professional period instrument violinist and has been a member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) since 2000. With OAE, Claire has performed and recorded a vast range of Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire, varying from self-directed chamber programmes to early twentieth-century symphonic repertoire and commissions by contemporary composers. In addition, Claire has played with many other period instrument ensembles including The Sixteen, Florilegium, Steinitz Bach Players and Collegium Musicum 90.

Claire was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts in 2010, and she spent 4 years at Cardiff University researching early nineteenth-century violin playing and lecturing on historical performance before coming to the University of Oxford Music Faculty as a Research Fellow in 2014. In April 2016 Claire became Principal Investigator on the 5 year, AHRC funded Transforming C19 HIP project, leading a team of four researchers. Claire is also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford.

Claire teaches Historical Performance classes at the Royal Academy of Music, London and has given lectures, workshops and masterclasses and coaching projects in many UK universities and conservatoires, as well as at the Koninklijk Conservatorium, Den Haag, Universität der Künste Berlin, Université de Poitiers, L’Université Paris-Sorbonne, Jeune Orchestre de l’Abbaye (Abbaye aux Dames, Saintes). She has presented a number of pre-concert talks at the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall London and on the radio for the BBC Proms. Claire is often asked to provide advice and coaching to soloists, orchestral leaders, and professional ensembles on early nineteenth-century string playing.

 

George Kennaway

Dr George Kennaway is a cellist, conductor, teacher, and musicologist. Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford, the Guildhall School of Music, the Salzburg Mozarteum, and the University of Leeds. He studied the cello with Marie Dare, Valentine Orde, Michael Edmonds, and Christopher Bunting. He was a member of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and then principal cello no. 2 in the Orchestra of Opera North for 28 years, and now regularly appears as a soloist and chamber music player, on modern, 19th-century, and baroque cello. He was a member of the research team for the CHASE project in 19th-century editions of string music at the University of Leeds, Director of Music at the University of Hull, and is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, visiting tutor in early music at Newcastle University, and tutor in conducting at the University of Hull. He chairs the committee of the North-East Early Music Forum and is a trustee of the Leeds Lieder Festival. With David Milsom and Jonathan Gooing, he is a member of the Meiningen Ensemble, a chamber group which explores practical applications of historical research to the 19th-century repertoire. He has conducted orchestras in the UK, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Italy, and Lithuania, and currently conducts the Harrogate Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sheffield Chamber Orchestra. His book Playing The Cello 1780-1930 appeared in 2014, and he has also published on a range of topics from Haydn cello concerto editions to applications of Foucauldian discourse theory to musical performance. He also specializes in aspects of the music of the Baltic states. He has taught at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Lithuanian National Academy of Music.

 

Neal Peres da Costa

A graduate of the University of Sydney, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London), the City University (London) and the University of Leeds (UK), Neal Peres Da Costa is a world-renowned performing scholar and educator. He is Professor of Historical Performance within the Historical Performance Division (which he founded and of which he was Chair from 2006-2016) and Program Leader of Postgraduate Research at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. His monograph Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) is hailed as a book that ‘no serious pianist should be without’ (Limelight, 2012) and honoured as ‘a notable book’ on Alex Ross’s 2012 Apex List. In 2012, it was the subject of a five-part series broadcast by ABC Classic FM during the Sydney International Piano Competition and an interview with Christopher Lawrence for the ABC Classic FM Music Makers programme. During 2015-16 Neal was a chief editor (with Clive Brown and Kate Bennett Wadsworth for the new Bärenreiter Urtext performing edition of the complete Brahms chamber works for one solo instrument and piano) which has received critical acclaim. Bärenreiter have commissioned Neal (with Clive Brown) to produce editions of the Beethoven and Eberl Sonatas for violin and piano. Neal has recently received prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) funding for a three-year Discovery Project (2017-19) for performance research in 19th-century piano playing.

Neal regularly performs with Australia’s leading ensembles including the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Pinchgut Opera, the Song Company, the Australian Haydn Ensemble and Ironwood. He has performed at the Festival Baroque, the Peninsula Summer Festival, the Music Viva Festival, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, the York Early Music Festival (UK) and Pegasus Music (US). He is involved in on-going projects with the Australia Haydn Ensemble including, in 2017, performances of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5, and a recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos nos. 1 and 3 to be released in 2017. With Ironwood, Neal undertakes cutting-edge creative research that has led to performances and recordings of late-Romantic chamber repertoire in period style which have received critical acclaim. Neal has an extensive collection of historical pianos including grand pianos by Collard and Collard (English c.1840), Erard (French c.1869), and Streicher (Viennese replica c.1868).

Winner of the 2008 Fine Arts ARIA for Best Classical Recording for Bach’s Sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord (ABC Classics, 2007) with Richard Tognetti and Daniel Yeadon, Neal’s discography includes: Bach’s Complete Sonatas for Viola Da Gamba and Harpsichord with Daniel Yeadon (ABC Classics, 2009), The Baroque Trombone with Christian Lindberg and the ACO (BIS, 2009); The Galant Bassoon with Matthew Wilke and Kees Boersma (Melba, 2009); Baroque Duets(Vexations 840, 2011) which he directed with Fiona Campbell, David Walker and Ironwood; Music for a While with Ironwood and Miriam Allan (2012); 3 with Genevieve Lacey and Daniel Yeadon (ABC Classics, 2012); Mozart: Stolen Beauties with Anneke Scott and Ironwood (ABC Classics, 2015) and most recently Brahms: Tones of Romantic Extravagance (ABC Classics, 2016). He has also recorded extensively on the Channel Classics label with Florilegium, the British ensemble which he co-founded in 1991 and of which he was a member for 10 years.

 

Anneke Scott

Anneke Scott began her studies at The Royal Academy of Music, London with Pip Eastop and Andrew Clark. She was subsequently awarded prestigious scholarships to further her studies in France (with Claude Maury) and Holland (with Teunis van der Zwart), where she concentrated on aspects of period horn playing.

Since her graduation from The Royal Academy of Music in 2000 she has been in demand with ensembles in the UK and continental Europe. She is principal horn of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and The English Baroque Soloists, Harry Christopher’s The Orchestra of the Sixteen, Fabio Biondi’s Europa Galante, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Dunedin Consort and Players, The Kings Consort and Avison Ensemble as well as appearing regularly as a guest principal with orchestras and ensembles worldwide.

For many years she has had a keen interest in chamber music which led her to become a founder member of The Etesian Ensemble. Through this ensemble she met the fortepianist Kathryn Cok with whom she formed a duo specialising in Classical and Romantic repertoire for horn and fortepiano. Kathryn and Anneke were selected as two of Making Music’s Concert Promoters Network Artists for 2008–2009 and toured Holland in 2009 as part of the Organisatie Oudemuziek Netwerk. Their debut disc of virtuosic music for natural horn and fortepiano from early nineteenth-century Vienna was released in June 2011 by Challenge Classics. She is also a founder member of ensembleF2 with whom she performed the Mozart Horn Quintet at London’s Wigmore Hall in April 2009.

In 2005–2006 she undertook research at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Early Music Performance, where she currently teaches period horns. As a result of this research she was interviewed in 2006 by BBC TV for the BBC2 series The People’s Museum discussing the Hofmaster horns housed at Edinburgh University. In 2005 she was invited by The Bate Collection, Oxford to perform in concert on one of their magnificent original Hofmaster horns dating from the mid 18th-centur. Since then Anneke has had an active working relationship with the collection which recently resulted in a CD featuring horn works from the late seventeenth through to the early twentieth century all performed on instruments from the collection.

In 2010 Anneke was awarded a Gerard Finzi Travel Scholarship to undertake research in Paris in preparation for her recording of the Jacques-François Gallay Douze Grands Caprices on natural horn release by Resonus Classics in October 2012. This was to form the first disc in a series of three, all featuring the works of Gallay. The second, with the natural horn ensemble Les Chevaliers de Saint Hubert, was released in 2013 with the third, featuring operatic fantasias with Steven Devine (piano) and Lucy Crowe (soprano) released in 2015.

Anneke’s activities are not confined to period performance. She has performed the music of Ligeti with The London Sinfonietta, and can be heard on two albums with The Nigel Waddington Big Band. In 2013 she recorded John Croft’s work …une autre voix qui chante… for solo hand-horn, a work written especially for her.

In 2007 Anneke was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, an honour awarded to past students of the Academy who have distinguished themselves in the music profession and made a significant contribution to their field.

 

Emily Worthington

Emily Worthington joined the University of Huddersfield in 2015 as a Lecturer in Music Performance and a member of the Huddersfield Centre for Performance Research (HuCPeR).. Emily’s postgraduate performance training took place at the Royal College of Music and through the Formation Superieure de l’Abbaye aux Dames de Saintes, where she specialised in playing historical clarinets dating from the 18th- to the early-20th century.  This was followed by a doctorate at the University of York, where, supported by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, she investigated the impact of the emergent recording and broadcasting industries on woodwind playing in early-20th-century London orchestras. An Edison Visiting Fellowship at the British Library in 2014 enabled her to begin a large-scale survey of early wind chamber music recordings. Emily’s research interests are wide ranging, including British musical culture in from the late-18th to the mid-20th century, history of sound recording and broadcasting (particularly the early BBC), performance practice 1750-1950, and topics relating to woodwind performance and repertoire. Emily’s current research combines practice-based research on period instruments with the use of archival documents and sound recordings to investigate aspects of 18th, 19th and 20th-century performing styles and their modern application.

Emily is also a busy professional clarinettist specialising in period instruments from the 18th to the 20th century. She has worked with many leading ensembles in the UK and Europe including The King’s Consort, The Gabrieli Consort and Players, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy of Ancient Music, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, Le Concert Spirituel and Spira Mirabilis. Emily also co-directs Boxwood & Brass, a period-instrument Harmonie whose debut CD Music for a Prussian Salon was released on Resonus Classics in October 2016 to unanimous critical praise. Emily been invited to coach and lecture on performance-related topics at conservatoires and universities around the UK.

www.emilyworthington.co.uk

www.boxwoodandbrass.co.uk

 

Registration and Practical information

The course fee is £395.

This covers tuition, lectures, concerts and daily lunches and coffee/tea breaks. There are many pubs, restaurants and grocery stores in the area for evening meals.

While registration is open until 1st August, the course is nearly full.

Please email c19hip@music.ox.ac.uk with questions or enquiries.

Address: Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, St Aldate’s, Oxford, OX1 1DB

Travel: There are direct buses from London Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and Stanstead, to Oxford. Most buses will stop very near the Music Faculty. Travel by train is best to ‘Oxford’ (not ‘Oxford Parkway’). From the train station to the Music Faculty is a 20 minute walk, 10 minute coach ride or 5 minute taxi.

Instruments: Secure overnight instrument storage will be available at the Faculty for the duration of the course.

Accommodation: Accommodation can be booked directly through standard sites such as uk.hotels.com, booking.com, airbnb.co.uk, etc. but participants my also wish to look at:

University Rooms 
 
Oxford Abingdon Road Travelodge
 

Practice Rooms: The practice rooms at the Faculty of Music will be available for participants to use during the course.

Please contact c19hip@music.ox.ac.uk for further information and questions about practical matters.