François PINEAU-BENOIS (Paris) 
Violin recital

Paganini and Bach 

Saturday 4 May 2024, 7.30pm, St. Botolph’s Church, TRUNCH.  

Paganini’s Caprices are widely considered as the most difficult pieces ever written for the solo violin. A beautiful, famous cycle with an enormous arsenal of technical delights.
With his Caprices Niccolò Paganini set out to fascinate the audience and play the kind of music that people had never experienced before. As a young talent Niccolò had shocked and enraged the public by imitating animals using his violin and in the Caprices he elaborated on that earlier experimentation. Birdsong, hunting horns, laughter, donkeys – they were all brought to life through his instrument. Above all Paganini’s caprices are full of drama. Calm and moving passages interchange without warning with fiery, almost violent passages.

For François Pineau-Benois it is not the technical aspects of the music, but exactly that enormous variety in the musical characters, the extraordinary sound landscape, and the fantasy and lyricism that has amazed him all his life and has been an inspiration for this concert. In addition to Paganini, François also will be playing  One Sonata and One Partita by J.-S. Bach. The 2nd Partita is widely known for its Chaconne, considered one of the most masterly and expressive works ever written for solo violin. 

Violinist of the new generation François Pineau-Benois, nicknamed by the international press “French virtuoso”, entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP) at the age of 14. He holds master degrees in violin and chamber music from the CNSMDP and also studied with Régis Pasquier at the Ecole Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot. 

François is a laureate of competitive career grants from the Adami (2023), «Culture moves Europe» EU individual mobility grant (2023), the Fondation Banque Populaire and Safran pour la Musique (2017) as well as of the prizes from several competitions: the First Prize (duo) at the International Pro Musici Competition (2019, Paris), the Grand Prix of the International Alexander Glazounov Competition (2017, Paris), the Grand Prix Ciboure of the Ravel Academy (2015, Saint-Jean-de-Luz), the Young Artist Award of the International Leopold Mozart Competition (2013, Augsburg) and others.
A musician with an exceptional sound, he has been invited to play with renowned musicians such as François-René Duchable, Régis Pasquier, Roland Pidoux and young musicians in France, Belgium, Russia, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Israel, United Kingdom, Austria.  
François Pineau-Benois plays the historic Italian violin (XVIII) “Le Genève” of French virtuoso of the beginning of XXth century Lucien Durosoir, graciously lent by the Foundation Musicians between War and Peace. He is professor at the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris.

The ChamberMusicBox (London) QUINTET 

Shostakovich, Faure 

Saturday 25 May 2024, 7.30pm, St. Botolph’s Church, TRUNCH.

Concert dedicated to Roy Abrams (1929 – 2019)

Shostakovich Piano Quintet, Faure Op.89 Piano Quintet.

The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich is considered to be one of the best chamber-music masterpieces of the 20th century. Shostakovich wrote the quintet in the summer of 1940, and it was an immediate success. As one observer recalled, it “was discussed in trams, …people tried to sing in the streets the second defiant theme of the finale.” This quintet sounds like the song before the storm, with a “show must go on” feel. The latter strain of the finale is derived from a tune traditionally played at the entrance of the clowns in the Russian circus…

For Shostakovich, life as an artist in Soviet Russia was harrowing. He found himself praised one day, condemned the next, publicly humiliated and nearly arrested. His success reached its peak in 1934 with the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District, which became a sensation in Leningrad, Moscow and abroad. Then in 1936 Stalin attended a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre. Two days later an article in Pravda denounced the opera for pandering to the decadent tastes of the bourgeois West and warned, “This is a game…that may end very badly.” Shostakovich was cast down overnight to the abyss as pernicious purveyor of cultural depravity. Shaken, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony from its scheduled premiere and began the work that would redeem him: the Fifth Symphony of 1937. Three years later, as a further sign of renewed official approval, his Piano Quintet received a “category one” award, the highest level of Stalin Prize. The prize carried the sum of 100,000 rubles, an enormous sum for a chamber work. 
The quintet was a deliberate effort by Shostakovich to revive the traditional forms of the 17th and 18th centuries. The movements carry captions like “Prelude,” “Fugue,” and “Intermezzo”, with  some references to Bach, Beethoven and Haydn. Every note is clean and poised, the music moving seamlessly between the apparently light-hearted and the intensely moving. The finale is strikingly simple and powerfully memorable.  

The Piano Quintet Op.89 in D minor by Gabriel Fauré is one of his finest, but probably not so very well known chamber work. This romantic and slightly melancholic quintet is dedicated to the violinist Eugène Ysaye, a friend of Fauré with whom he gave concerts in 1888 and 1889. A Belgian virtuoso violinist, Ysaÿe was touring a lot, including all of Europe, the United States and Russia, he was regarded as “The Tsar of the Violin”.

THE PANTALOONS THEATRE

‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ by Oscar Wilde

SUNDAY 16 June 2024, 7.30pm, St. Nicholas Church, SWAFIELD

Young Artists – Public Favourites of the Southrepps Music Festival 2023

Lily Mo Browne (mezzo soprano)
Armand Rabot (baritone)

with Tom Primrose (piano)

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

Tom Primrose is a British conductor, accompanist and coach.  As the Artistic co-Director of the Southrepps Music Festival, Tom is very well known and loved in Norfolk. 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 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 inOrpheus 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.

Armand Rabot is a young powerful Baritone from the Northwest of England studying with Ben Johnson. Recently Armand won the prestigious Grange Festival Prize and has also won the Junior Kathleen Ferrier Bursary award, the Charles Wood Junior Song Competition, the Junior Charles Wood Song Prize, the James Martin Oncken Song Prize, and was placed second in the inaugural Flat Pack Music Opera Competition. Armand was a Semi-Finalist in the London Mozart Competition.
Armand’s recent concert appearances include recitals at Liverpool Philharmonic and the Charles Wood Festival, Elijah with Birkenhead Choral Society, the Mozart Requiem at Liverpool Cathedral and Marple Choral Society, The Messiah with the Salford Choral Society, Birkenhead Choral Society and Shrewsbury Cathedral. Brahms Requiem and Puccini Messa Di Gloria with Formby Choral Society, The Creation with Keele Bach Choir, D’Astorga Stabat Mater with EMAE, Faure Requiem at Blackburn Cathedral, Mozart C minor Mass with the Amadeus Choir,  and Bach Cantatas 62,158,32, The John Passion and the Matthew Passion with the Liverpool Bach Collective.