Cambridge Week 3 – Concerts
If you know me, then you know I like classical music to the point where it’s almost concerning. So, a fair amount of my evenings here in the UK have unsurprisingly been hanging out with old people listening to classical music.
Because these concerts have been at night, my pictures have been pretty bad. So this post is going to be pretty scant on pictures, sorry.
Cambridge Summer Music Festival
Bach – St. John Passion
This was the fist concert I went to here, and was the season opener for the Cambridge Summer Music Festival. I didn’t get the booklet with the English translation, so I got to enjoy the Gospel of John for two hours in lovely German that I don’t understand. I still enjoyed it, though.
Britten Sinfonia Academy
The Britten Sinfonia is very similar to A Far Cry in Boston, both being chamber orchestra groups with no ‘leader’ – all members have equal leadership and they play with no conductor. A Far Cry frequently collaborates with students at the New England Conservatory, and similarly the Britten Sinfonia has an academy for high school students to get involved in a chamber group. I didn’t know this was going to be a concert played mostly by teenagers, especially when the program included pieces like Ligeti’s Romanian Concerto or Mendelssohn’s Overture ‘The Herbrides’ – pieces very far beyond what most high school students would play.
Ben Comeau Lunchtime Concert
This was an unexpectedly fun concert. When buying tickets, there was no announced program, but the blurbs about the pianist were interesting enough and the tickets cheap enough that I decided to go anyway. I’ve noticed in the UK that programs aren’t free – any concert I’ve been to in the US shoves programs in your face, which makes sense considering they’re short novels of advertisements with maybe two pages of program notes. So, this concert was a game for me of seeing if I could recognize the pieces as he went. The first was excerpts from Bach’s The Musical Offering, I didn’t recognize the second, and the third was Ravels Alborada del Gracioso from Miroirs. As he was playing his main program, he passed around a piece of paper asking for musical themes.
After the first three pieces, he mentioned the second was the premier of a piece he had composed (so I felt better about not knowing it), and collected the list of themes and improvised on them, which was honestly the highlight of the concert. He started with Hedwig’s Theme played as a tango, and of course any improvisation wouldn’t be complete without music from Frozen, but there were really neat nods for people in the know, like Claire de Lune played in the style of Ravel’s Scarbo.
I of course requested 4’33”, and I assume being an overused and pretty unfunny joke he skipped my suggestion.
Brandenburg Concerti
This was the second time I went to a concert of Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concerti, and this certainly was a concert of Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concerti. I really don’t have much to say about this concert other than finding it really relaxing, so instead I’ll share a story from the first concert where I heard these pieces.
There are six concerti, each with three movements. I went to this concert with my mom and my sister, and my mom being extremely patient with me dragging her to very long concerts of music that she isn’t extremely interested in, started putting her coat on after the last movement of the second Concerto. It took me a second to understand, and I still look back on that and laugh. I try to remember that when people don’t follow the right ‘etiquette’ at concerts – not everyone is as ‘ingrained’ in classical music, and it’s not good to fall into elitism about people not knowing things about it – like the difference between a movement and a Concerto.
Goldberg Variations
This is my second time listening to the Goldberg Variations in Cambridge! Just a different one this time. Christopher Taylor played the Goldberg Variations at Longy School of Music of Bard College last December, along with Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated (which is still one of the best concerts I’ve been to).
Bach’s Goldberg Variations are definitely something you can listen to over and over again and always find something new to like. I left this concert with the last variation stuck in my head, which is one that never really stuck with me before.
BBC Proms
The BBC Proms are probably the things I’ve most looked forward to here. I was impatient and bought tickets before my class schedule came out, so I have had to skip some concerts, but I have been to one so far – Proms 8, Invitation to the Dance at Royal Albert Hall in London.
There’s no way I could take a picture this nice – Image Source
The program was Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Barók’s Dance Suite, a violin concerto composed by the conductor Péter Eötvös, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird.
The Debussy is one of my favorite pieces, and for anyone that likes Impressionism the two pieces I really love from the period are Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.
Jack Gibbons Oxford Series
Jack Gibbons is a pianist that I found through YouTube, and will take any opportunity to see play. I found him through his performances of Alkan, a composer who experienced a kind of revival in the 1970s, and Jack Gibbons at the age of 17 gave the second ever complete performance of Alkan’s complete Concerto for Solo Piano.
I first saw him play the Gershwin Concerto in F in New Jersey, but this concert was The Life of Chopin, unsurprisingly about Chopin. There was a really good mix of Chopin’s more large-scale pieces like the famous “Heroic” Polonaise and the smaller Etudes, Mazurkas, and Waltzes.
He plays these concerts every year at the Holywell Music Room at Oxford, which is surprisingly difficult to get to from Cambridge, especially when trying to get back to Cambridge at 10pm. Even though Cambridge and Oxford are pretty close if you drive, for public transportation you have to go through London. I ended up checking into an Airbnb about 15 minutes after booking it.
