CityLife

Jennifer helps bid farewell to spring

CHETHAM'S GIRL: Jennifer Pike

IT’S become something of a tradition for the Bridgewater Hall to end its spring season with a couple of Sunday morning recitals in June, and this year the spotlight is on a young and familiar face, 19-year-old violinist Jennifer Pike – former Chetham’s student and the youngest ever winner of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition in 2002.

In two ‘Morning Serenades’, on Sunday this weekend and a week later, she will be accompanied by Martin Roscoe, the vastly experienced former head of keyboard at the Royal Northern College of Music (and now on the staff at the Guildhall School in London).

Jennifer is a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and the Bridgewater Hall concerts will be recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

The programmes focus on Beethoven sonatas, with new works written for Jennifer Pike – one by Edwin Roxburgh and one by Jennifer’s father, Jeremy – plus one Bach solo sonata (on June 21), and warhorses by Ysaÿe and Paganini.

Martin Roscoe’s long-time colleague and another former Chetham’s student, the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition winning Peter Donohoe (pictured), also gives a recital next week – on Tuesday, in the Whiteley Hall at Chetham’s – as part of the celebratory Piano Forty series, marking the school’s ruby anniversary as a specialist music institution.

Peter attended Chetham’s from 1964 to 1971, experiencing first-hand the transition Chets made in 1969. He’s chosen a programme of personal nostalgia and memories: Chopin waltzes op. 18 and 64, the Nocturne op. 9, no. 1 and Scherzo no. 3, plus Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata and a set of Liszt pieces – La Vallée d’Obermann, Les Cloches de Genève, Les Jeux d’Eaux à la Villa d’Este and Venezia e Napoli, from Années de Pélerinage.

Peter says: “Throughout my career I have played a lot of different types of music from the different periods, and I find the links and trends in musical history fascinating – that is why I’m truly excited to be performing works that I learnt as a young Chets student.

“I first heard Chopin’s waltzes as a child and remember playing my 78 rpm record endlessly.

“It’s a wonderful piece: one that is difficult to master, but I still enjoy playing it, all these years later.”