CityLife

Classical highlights: Steven Osborne, Camerata, Chamber Concerts Society

Steven Osborne

March 12, 2010

Steven Osborne came to Manchester from Scotland as a student, aged 17, on the joint course for musicians at the University of Manchester and Royal Northern College of Music.

He spent six years studying here, living in Whalley Range, Rusholme and Old Trafford.

Now Steve, pictured right, lives in his childhood home, Linlithgow, and has a glittering international career as a solo pianist. But he has a real soft spot for Manchester.

“There was a great atmosphere in the college, and I made a lot of good friends there,” he says. “And I love the city. I used to cycle everywhere – and you never had to ride for more than 30 minutes to see anybody.”

He soaked up the resources of the university’s music teaching as well as life at the RNCM, finding the broader exposure it gave to the world of music invaluable.

His piano teacher for two years even before he came here – and then for all his time at the RNCM – was Renna Kellaway, the remarkable woman who was head of keyboard studies at the college until a few years ago.

She is still highly active as artistic director of Lake District Summer Music, the combined music festival and summer school which takes place each summer in Cumbria.

“My previous teacher in Edinburgh told me he felt I needed different input,” he recalls. “I needed to get all the nuts and bolts in place. That was a fantastic thing for a teacher to say. He was a great musician himself.”

Steven shares his home with his wife, Jeannie, an American whom he met in Singapore. It was something of a whirlwind romance.

“She was a clarinettist in the Singapore Symphony Orchestra when I went there to play – I stayed about a week.

“We got talking ... and it all happened very fast. I took a holiday and then within a month we were married. And I’m normally very cautious by nature!”

The wedding was in Vermont in the USA, but there was a big party in Scotland afterwards as well. He’s at the Bridgewater Hall tonight, playing Britten’s piano concerto in a BBC Philharmonic concert conducted by Ludovic Morlot.

“It’s a great piece, with lots of bracing energy and colour,” he says. “Britten was a master of the orchestra and musical effect.”

It’s a good week for pianists, with Slava Sidorenko at the Mid-day Concert on Tuesday, and then on Thursday Polina Leschenko (pictured below left) returns to the Hallé, with Sir Mark Elder conducting, to play Chopin’s second concerto.

If you haven’t heard Leschenko before, you should. She was the solo pianist chosen for the Hallé’s 150th anniversary concert just over two years ago, delivering Weber’s warhorse Konzertstück with charm and panache.

The other piano soloist from that memorable night was Jonathan Scott (who played in Lambert’s The Rio Grande), and he’s at the Bridgewater Hall on Wednesday in his other capacity as virtuoso organist, with a programme including The Ride Of The Valkyries, plus my favourite of all French big-pedal-tune toccatas, the Final from Vierne’s first organ symphony.

*****

Manchester Camerata’s programme tomorrow night at the Bridgewater Hall (Haydn symphony, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella transcriptions from Pergolesi, and Beethoven’s violin concerto with the brilliant Valeriy Sokolov as soloist) is notable also for its conductor.

Richard Farnes, dynamic music director of Opera North, is in charge.

*****

Manchester Chamber Concerts Society completes its season on Monday at the Royal Northern College of Music with the combined forces of the Navarra and Sacconi string quartets.
Between them they’ll give two sextets (Straus’s from Capriccio, and Brahms’s in B flat) and round things off with the glorious Mendelssohn Octet.