PREMIERE The Full Rabbie (International Burns Nacht 2025) with the Ecclefechan T...

PREMIERES 7.30 PM TONIGHT. The Full Rabbie (International Burns Nacht 2025) with the Ecclefechan Tarts Orchestra and Choir. ..Burns Night January 25 January 2025. A celebration ( in Norfolk by four Sassenachs and two Germans) of the universal genius and geniality, in poetry and music, of Scotland's national poet Robbie Burns. Featuring  a feats of friendship and a banquet of traditional Scots fare, Selkirk Grace, The Address to the Haggis, The To the Immortal Memory of Rabbie Burns Lecture, the after dinner prayer,  My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, To The De'il, Elegy of the Year .. (updated to 2025) and other poems, Auld Lang Syne and other songs in the spirit of the great Radical Republican European Enlightenment Scots Thinker and Romantic. Lang may yer lum reek.

Review of Jubilee String Quartet Music For An Engish Country House (EDP July 22)

Music for an English Country House

Jubilee String Quartet

 

This King’s Lynn Festival event at Sandringham’s Park Houseouse was heavenly music and all the more so for defying both composers’ reputations for fairweather grace.  The playing was passionate and intense and both quartets gave ample material to express this. In Haydn’s consummate late G major quartet, the signature avuncular humour, ease and beguiling folk melodies were present and welcome but the old master pioneers a personal expressiveness that would have taught the young pretender more than he ever managed to do as Beethoven’s tutor. The themes are strong and the quiet warmth achieved at the end of the slow movement is won from strenuous effort, conveyed in virtuosic performances. Mendelsohn’s String Quartet in F minor was a furious meditation on disillusionment and grief in which the composer’s familiar calm, effervescence and tenderness – where present – are contextualised in stark contrast with dissonances and savage syncopations, full of menace and anxiety. We wait for consolations in vain.  The energy and power of the playing, like the music, never falters and somehow combines savagery with poise, four instruments in soaring unison. Music for an English country house haunted by sorrow and despair.

 

EDP Tuesday 22 July