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.

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.

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MARIA KONOSHENKO, mezzo-soprano

Songs of exile – old and new

SUNDAY 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 “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 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 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 the music in many different languages, of many different styles including Baroque, music of C20, Traditional slavic songs, Jazz and even African folk music.

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

Ryan Corbett

Virtuoso Accordion Recital

Transcriptions of well-known composers (Bach) alongside original works for classical accordion 

Saturday 31 August 2024, 7.30pm, St. Nicholas Church, Swafield.

BBC New Generation artist, Royal Over-Seas League Gold medallist and Classic FM Rising Star, Ryan Corbett is an accordionist hailed by Sir James MacMillan as “one of the most astonishing and surprising newcomers in Scottish music.” A leading exponent of his instrument, he has given over eight hours of radio broadcasts and a televised performance at the Scottish Coronation of HM King Charles III. Corbett has enlarged the repertoire by creating hundreds of new arrangements for accordion, but no matter how strong his passion for the instrument, it is his dedication to musical integrity that takes precedence.

Recent seasons have seen recitals across Europe at venues including the Berlin Philharmonie, he has also performed in the USA, Mexico, and China. In the UK Corbett frequents major festivals including Bath, Beaminster, Beaumaris, Budleigh, Buxton, Cambridge Summer Music, Chipping Campden, Cumnock Tryst, Deal, Edinburgh, Lake District, Lammermuir, Lichfield, St Magnus, Norfolk & Norwich, Oxford Song, Paxton, Perth, Ryedale, Southrepps, and the Keyboard Festival at St George’s Bristol. He makes his debut at London’s Wigmore Hall this year.

Ryan Corbett has performed with BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, Red Note Ensemble, Maxwell Quartet, singers Nicholas Mulroy, Ben Johnson and Lotte Betts-Dean, cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia, violinist Geneva Lewis, and trumpeter Aaron Akugbo. Together with his accordion teacher Djordje Gajic, Corbett performs his own arrangements of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Bach’s ‘St Anne’ Prelude and Fugue which was described as “musically unified and utterly compelling” (Seen and Heard International). He also works with composers to create new music for the accordion. This year he gave the premiere of Daniel Soley’s accordion concerto with Britten Sinfonia, and he will give the UK premiere of Mikhail Pletnev’s accordion concerto this August.

Ryan Corbett won first prize at the 2022 Bromsgrove International Musicians’ competition and is a prize winner of international accordion competitions in Italy, Germany, and China. He was nominated in the Young Artist category of the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards and has been listed as ‘one to watch’ by BBC Music Magazine, Interlude HK, The Scotsman and Scala Radio. Corbett was a Tillet Trust and Munster Trust recital scheme artist and is the first accordionist to be part of the prestigious BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist scheme since its launch in 1999. He has also performed at private events for Sir Jackie Stewart and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Born in Glasgow in 1999, Corbett studied at the Music School of Douglas Academy, St Mary’s Music School, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He was introduced to the accordion aged eleven, when his grandmother bought a small instrument for him and his brother to try. As the instrument wasn’t airtight, the only way to play it was like a piano, while the other pulled the bellows across the floor. It was soon fixed, and Corbett would spend hours playing Scottish folk music on it rather than practising the piano or violin on which he was receiving lessons. He continued to teach himself accordion until the age of fourteen, when he began studying with Djordje Gajic. These studies were supported by Cross Trust, Drake Calleja Trust, Countess of Munster Musical Trust, RCS Scholarship Fund and Help Musicians UK.

“I am not clear how it is possible to achieve the variation in voice, as well as tone and dynamics, we heard in his approach to music written for organ and piano, but it was certainly audible. And the visual advantage of the front-facing accordion is that his remarkably dextrous technique could not have been easier to admire.” Keith Bruce, VoxCarnyx