Young Artists – Public Favourites of the Southrepps Music Festival 

Lily Mo Browne (mezzo soprano)
Oliver Bowes (baritone)
with Tom Primrose (piano)

Saturday 20 July 2024, 7.30pm,
St. Botolph’s Church, TRUNCH.

We simply couldn’t fail to invite them to give a concert in Trunch: soft and deep mezzo soprano Lily Mo Browne and commanding and rich baritone Oliver Bowes were both among the best young artists of the Southrepps Festival, both attracted great attention of the audience and received superb reviews. Oliver showed a remarkable ability to evoke deep emotion and leave his audience entranced. Lilly not only has a wonderful voice with a honeyed timbre, but also amazing dramatic talent.

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PROGRAMME:

La Belle Dame sans Merci – Stanford

A Soft Day – Stanford

Pace non trovo – Liszt

I vidi in terra – Liszt

Lorelei – C. Schumann

Mondnacht – R. Schumann

Green Rain – Trimble

The Crocodile – Arr. Britten

Interval

The aria from La Resurrezione is Qual‘insolita luce… Caddi, E ver! – Handel

My Father! Ah Methinks I see (from Hercules) – Handel

Vien Leonora & Quando le soglie paterne (From La Favorite) – Donizetti

Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix (from Samson et Dalila) – Saint-Saëns

Deh Vieni a la finestra (from Don Giovanni) – Mozart

Dido’s Lament (from Dido and Aeneas) – Purcell

Traditional: The Mermaid – Arr. Vignoles

At the Southrepps Music Festival 2023 Lily Mo Browne, a 23 year-old mezzo-soprano from East London, took part as a soloist in Rossini’s Petite Messe Solenelle and performed superbly at the Gala concert. Oliver Bowes in 2022 with great success performed as the Counsel for the Plaintiff (in Trial by Jury), alongside Ben Johnson and Sophie Bevan.
Tom Primrose is very well known and loved in Norfolk, especially for his work as the Artistic co-Director of the Southrepps Festival. In May 2015 with big success Tom gave a concert at St.Botolph’s Church, with soprano Susanna Hurrell, and now he is returning to Trunch with two young rising stars of his Festival, which has grown to become the highlight of the year in the Norfolk classical music scene.

Tom Primrose is a British conductor, accompanist and coach.  He works principally in opera, and his freelance work takes him all over the world, including Opéra National de Paris, Opéra de Montecarlo, Det Kongelige Teater og Kapel in Copenhagen, and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg.
Tom is an award-winning piano accompanist, and has performed in many of the UK’s principal concert halls and festivals, on BBC television and radio, and has collaborated with leading singers and instrumentalists including Ben Johnson, Christina Gansch, Sophie Bevan, Ellie Laugharne, Jonathan McGovern, Mary Bevan, Susanna Hurrell, Ruby Hughes, Ema Nikolovska, Claire Barnett-Jones, Jose Maria del Monaco,  amongst many others. Recent conducting credits include Britten Les Illuminations and The Burning Fiery Furnace, Verdi’s Requiem, Mozart Sinfonia Concertante, Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, Handel Messiah, Faure and Durufle Requiems.

Lily Mo Browne is currently in her first year on the Vocal and Opera Masters Programme at the Royal College of Music, studying under Ben Johnson and Mikey Pandya, and she is a Robert Lancaster Scholar. Lily Mo Browne was a Southrepps Music Festival Young Artist in 2022 and a 2023 Emerging Artist at Nevill Holt Opera in Leicester.  Lily placed third in the Junior Ferrier competition in 2019, and was a recipient of the Pamela Hart award. With a passion for song and spoken text, Lily has performed in numerous song concerts, including the RCM’s SongPlus concerts with Audrey Hyland, selections of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer and other songs at the Luton Music Club with Simon Lepper, and most recently Benjamin Britten’s Cabaret Songs with Ella O’Neill.

Her operatic roles include Second Witch (Dido and Aeneas-Hurn Court Opera) and Old Lady (Candide-Southgate Youth Opera). She has performed with the Royal College of Music International Opera Studio during both productions of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte as Zweite Dame and later, as cover Dreite Dame, chorus in Orpheus in the Underworld and most recently, La Regina in Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco.  Lily performed with the Grange Festival in a concert performance of David Matthews’ opera Anna.  She was the alto soloist in Handel’s Messiah at The Priory in Dorset.  Lily joined the South Bank Sinfonia in May 2024 as the alto soloist for Haydn’s Nelson Mass.

MARIA KONOSHENKO
mezzo-soprano, piano 

Songs of exile – old and new

SATURDAY 27 July 2024, 7.30pm,
St. Nicholas Church, SWAFIELD

Maria Konoshenko, the Russian born mezzo-soprano, performed in Norfolk many times, she is very well known to the audience of Trunch Concerts. In spring 2022 Maria raised her voice against Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and performed at the “Songs for Ukraine” fundraising concert in Trunch. Maria currently lives in Finland and works at the University of Helsinki.

This concert will be dedicated to the multiple experiences of war, emigration and protests. Maria will sing some of the old songs by Alexander Vertinsky, as well as her own newly composed songs based on modern poetry in English and Russian (with on-screen translation). Alexander Vertinsky was a poet, singer, composer and cabaret artist of the post-revolutionary emigration, who exerted seminal influence on the Russian tradition of artistic singing. Even Sergei Rachmaninov, who hated gramophone recordings, greatly appreciated the recordings of Alexander Vertinsky’s songs. In  1926, Vertinsky made one of the earliest recordings of the song  “Endless Road” (“Dorogoi dlinnoyu”) which, with English lyrics by Gene Raskin, was a major hit for Mary Hopkin in 1968 as “Those Were the Days”.

Maria is not only a wonderful singer, but also a linguist. She loves to perform music in many different languages, of many different styles including Baroque, music of C20, traditional slavic songs, Jazz and even African folk music.

Video (below) with a fragment of Maria’s performance at her concert in 2023: ‘Wie lange noch’ by K. Weill, Walter Mehring (1944). Piano – Mary Howard.

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