MUSIC AND ART INSPIRED BY SHAKESPEARE No. 5: All At Sea – [this talk was cancelled but I have included it so that anyone interested can see what art I was going to talk about. I have adjusted the music as I included some works in other talks]. Much of Shakespeare takes place when characters…
MUSIC AND ART INSPIRED BY SHAKESPEARE No. 2: Love’s Labours Some Music and Art inspired by Shakespeare’s great love stories, especially Romeo and Juliet but also Othello, Much Ado About Nothing and others. Opening Music – Opening of Act III of Prokofiev’s Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” That music is not the most conventional for a…
Sadly not enough people signed up for this course to run at the City Lit on Saturday 11th October 2014 but here is one of the handouts I was planning to give out. Timeline Amy Beach Timeline
Florence Price – Composer and Pioneer A child prodigy making her concert debut at 4, the same age as Mozart, Florence Price graduated with 2 diplomas at the age of 19. She was a professional organist, concert pianist and teacher, heading the music department at Clark University, Georgia at 23. Of her 300 compositions her…
Cécile Chaminade, from Fame to Obscurity In her lifetime Chaminade was celebrated round the world but her reputation has diminished since her death. Her remarkable output ranges from delightful salon pieces to serious chamber, vocal and orchestral works. This course was about the extraordinary life and beautiful music of one of the foremost French composers…
Dame Ethel Smyth, Composer and Suffragette The remarkable life of a pioneer of women composers in Britain. All six of her operas were performed in her lifetime and her March of the Women was the battle cry of the Suffragettes. The course followed Ethel Smyth’s remarkable career from conventional middle class background through her musical…
Music for the Mass – A Thousand Years of Choral Music From its early origins in the Middle Ages, the Mass has inspired some of the greatest music by the greatest composers. This course examined the chronological development of the Mass and the Requiem by composers from the Middle Ages to the Present Day from…
Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn Fanny and Felix had a closer bond than probably any two other musicians but had very different careers due to their difference in gender. In his youth, Felix was described as the Mozart of the C19th but some considered his sister Fanny to be even more talented. She was destined by convention…