Accordes! Concert and Recording

Thanks to the generous support of the OUP John Fell Fund the TCHIP engaged in an ambitous project in August 2019 to explore C19 expressive asynchrony by launching a professsional string orchestra to experiment with aspects of nineteenth-century style.

A short documentary was made during the Accordes! project. It explains the research project and includes interviews with the players, the researchers and footage of the rehearsal process and performance.

Click here to watch the documentary and find out more about the process that led to the Accordes! recording of Serenades by Fuchs and Tchaikovsky.

Accordes! is a professional string orchestra comprised of leading performers and performer/scholars who have specialist expertise in C19 historically informed performance. This international group of performers are normally based in different locations around the globe but came together in Oxford to explore innovative approaches to late 19th-century style as part of the TCHIP project.

Directed by violinist and TCHIP Principal Investigator Claire Holden, Accordes! performed and record Serenades by Tchaikovsky and Fuchs. Five days of intensive rehearsal and experimentation were followed by a public concert on 5 September 2019, 7.30pm at SJE Arts on Iffley Road in Oxford. The performance was a rare chance to hear specialist performers perform these works with historically-evidenced C19th-century expression and with instruments set-up with historically appropriate (high tension) strings.

In addition to the historical research, rehearsal/ experimentation process, public concert and professional studio recording, there was also an empirical research process led by Eric Clarke and Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey investigating performer experiences, audience responses and objective measures of the sounding outputs of the ensemble. READ MORE...

In the days following the concert Accordes! made a studio recording of both works released commercially and available on all major streaming platforms including Naxos. To order a CD, contact claire.holden@music.ox.ac.uk .

Album excerpts

Fuchs: Serenade No. 1, Op. 9

Andante [excerpt]
Tempo di menuetto [excerpt]
Allegro scherzando [excerpt]
Adagio [excerpt]
Finale [excerpt]

Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings, Op.48

Pezzo in forma di sonatina [excerpt 1], [excerpt 2]
Valse [excerpt]
Élegie [excerpt]
Finale [excerpt 1] [excerpt 2]

Accordes! Musicians

Violin

Claire Holden, Rodolfo Richter, Nicholas DiEugenio, Andrew Roberts, Gary Ngan, Francis Liu, David Milsom, Stephen Rouse, Katharina Paul, Julia Wedman, Karin Cuéllar and Andrej Kapor