White Horse – Number 1

I wrote about the new management of our local pub in King’s Sutton (or gastro-pub I should say), the White Horse, not so long after they moved in and transformed the place – food, drink, service, value, ambience etc.

I walk past just about every day, and we go in to eat there with pleasure on a fairly regular basis, so it’s become clear that business has steadily grown under the watchful eye of front-of-house Julie and chef Hendrik.

What I hadn’t realised is that they are already Number 1 on Tripadvisor out of no less than 147 eateries in the Banbury area. What a gift for our lovely country village.

We will remember them...

 

On Sunday, the day before the centenary of the start of the First World War, the vicar of our local parish church in King’s Sutton, Father Roger Bellamy, orchestrated a special remembrance event ‒ a mix of words and music.

He asked me to read three of the poems – two by Wilfred Owen, ‘From My Diary, July 1914’ and the wonderful ‘Strange Meeting’, and a third by Laurence Binyon, the one that has this as its fourth verse:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

The fact that these words have been repeated thousands of times around the world does nothing to reduce their simplicity and their power.

 

Our village lost twenty-two men in that conflict and on Monday the church bell tolled 'at the going down of the sun' for each of them.

Circular Breathing with Banbury Didge Club

We had another ‘Come and Play’ in our village church recently. An amazing mix of local talent, from madrigals to Russ Conway and from jazz to Schumann: musical diversity all brought together by Sue Allen.

But the great eye-opener (ear-opener?) for me was the discovery of the Banbury Didgeridoo Club that apparently plays regularly in our Church Room in King’s Sutton – last Friday of every month at 8pm.

The guiding light of the club, Jono Guinness, played brilliantly, with all that extraordinary circular breathing which seems to defy nature.

This is they: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Banbury-Didge-Club/119257614799004

Pianist, composer and conductor

I suppose this combination was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms…

But more recently? Benjamin Britten comes to mind.

A major talent of this kind for the future is Alissa Firsova, who led a performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London on Monday. She opened by playing and directing Mozart’s great A major Piano Concerto K488 and followed this by conducting the first London performance of her own “Freedom” Clarinet Concerto. She ended with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Altogether an amazing achievement.

Currently a conducting student at the Academy, she had around her some dazzling young talent. Anna Hashimoto was the clarinettist and soprano Fiona Howell the soloist in the Mahler. The orchestra seemed to be a gathering together of Firsova’s student friends from the Academy. They were extraordinarily good.

I first met the then teenage Alissa several years ago, introduced by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, who brought her clarinet quintet “LOSS”, played by the Philharmonia Soloists at our local village music festival in King’s Sutton. And she has been coming back ever since.

A name to watch.

Rehearsal as a creative activity

I’ve always loved rehearsals. Probably somewhat more than performance or presentation. It’s a time when current ideas cross over with experimentation, so it can be a highly creative process.

In music, the first rehearsal that I remember was at school. It would have been around 1959 and I would have been fifteen.

Walking across the quad one afternoon, I could hear an orchestra playing in the hall, wandered in, and discovered Sir John Barbirolli rehearsing his wonderful Hallé Orchestra from Manchester. Rather shamefully, I don’t remember what the work was. What I do recall vividly was a dynamic sense of collective trial and error. And Barbirolli’s genial cajoling of the players to give of their best. His voice I can hear now – deep, authoritative but warm, the hint of a chuckle.

He struck me as an ideal leader figure. At one moment Barbirolli jumped down from the conductor’s rostrum and took the principal cellist’s instrument from him in order to demonstrate how he wanted a certain passage to go. Cheers and laughter from the players.

Ever since that time, I’ve attended rehearsals whenever I can. In fact for several years now I have an arrangement with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment that, in return for bits of work that I do with them, from time to time I can sit in on their rehearsals. To watch a great conductor working with a brilliant group of musicians is a real thrill for me to this day.

And as our little music festival kicked off this weekend in King’s Sutton, one of the greatest pleasures has been to see and hear Alissa Firsova (above) coaxing our restored 1872 Broadwood into giving voice again.

She played, exploring and polishing, for some four hours before finally giving her brilliant concert – Beethoven’s last sonata opus 111, Scriabin’s Poèmes, Bartok’s rarely performed Elegies and Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Jest from Vienna) opus 26.