CityLife

Classical highlights: Even more Mahler...

A great week for classical music

MAHLER mania in Manchester continues. January 30 sees one of the biggest projects of the whole sequence of events celebrating the composer, with a day devoted to him at the Bridgewater Hall.

It’s called Eternal Blue Horizons and is a joint project between the hall management and Manchester Camerata, all built around Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde – The Song Of The Earth.

You can go to a three-hour study session with Professor Julian Johnson and Bridgewater Hall artistic consultant Peter Davison on the background to The Song Of The Earth, exploring the songs and symphonies (starts 1.30pm). You can sit in on a recording of Radio 3’s Discovering Music, with a similar theme (5pm-6pm).

Then the evening concert by the Camerata features The Song Of The Earth, in the scaled-down version arranged by Schoenberg, with Douglas Boyd conducting, and Jane Irwin and Peter Wedd as soloists.

It’s preceded by two other pieces: a new work by Bushra El-Turk, getting its world premiere, and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (no.6), which, along with the Mahler, has been the basis of a big education project called Songbook Of The Earth.

Two days ago 2,000 primary school children were filing into the hall to hear the Camerata play the Beethoven, with poet-in-residence, Terry Caffrey, composer Kate Pearson and Camerata trumpet player Helen Quayle introducing it.

And on April 19 there’ll be a performance by 450 children of their own ‘songbook’ inspired by Mahler, Beethoven and the natural world.

Bushra El-Turk’s piece, Mosaic, is for the same orchestral resources as Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ and is also about the land – but connected to Mahler (and Beethoven) more, she says, by their experience of ‘otherness’ and rootlessness than by nature painting.

“I would say the creative trigger was a trip to the Dead Sea while visiting Jordan, which overlooked Palestine,” she says. “I experienced a strange nostalgia for a land I have never visited and to the idea that I may never be allowed to visit it – without risk.

“I use Mahler’s signature chords, both implicitly and explicitly. Mahler’s music speaks to me a great deal, quite directly. His portrayal of naivety and his use of irony are elements I relate to in my own music.

“In Mosaic, I reflect on how borders can be blurred, yet still differences can be immense.”

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EIGHT pianos on stage at the same time are promised at the Royal Northern College of Music on Sunday night (7pm).

It’s to celebrate the 70th birthday of Cheshire-born pianist John Wilson.

In fact Peter Donohoe, Julian Evans, John Gough, Peter Lawson, Nicholas Rimmer, Martin Roscoe, Graham Scott, Jonathan Scott, Keith Swallow and Andrew Wilde are all taking part – distinguished pianists who are local boys made good or resident in the Manchester area today.

They will be joined by John Wilson himself, and improvisation genius Harry Harris, once described by Jonathan Ross as ‘the best damn pianist in the civilised world’. The programme includes Ravel, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Haydn and Liszt, and the finale is John Wilson’s own Carmen Fantasie, for eight grand pianos.

John Wilson, born in Hyde, has been associated with the RNCM and, previously, the Northern School of Music for 55 years. His retirement concert in 2005 raised £18,000 which established the RNCM John Wilson Junior Fellowship in Piano Accompaniment, and Sunday’s event is to raise funds to secure it for the future.

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STOCKPORT Symphony Orchestra welcomes Vanessa Latarche, head of keyboard at the Royal College of Music in London, as soloist in Beethoven’s third piano concerto, at its concert tomorrow night at Stockport town hall. Conductor is Edward Warren.