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North Wales Live
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- North Wales Live
'Music legend's' joy over MBE after fears of 'speeding fine' subside
A 'music legend' from North Wales thought she'd been copped for speeding when she opened an official looking letter. But the news was far better than she feared. Ann Atkinson, the former artistic director of the North Wales International Music Festival, discovered that she had been awarded an MBE in the King's Birthday Honours. Ann said she was deeply touched to learn that she'd been nominated for the honour. She had served the festival with distinction for two decades before stepping down two years ago. In her new honorary role as a vice-president, she's looking forward to this year's event at St Asaph Cathedral from September 11 to 20. Join the North Wales Live Whatsapp community now But the arrival of the letter to inform her about the MBE prompted a feeling of momentary dread. She said: 'I saw this official looking letter and I thought I'd had a speeding fine or that I was being called to do jury service. 'When I opened it I was stuck on the first paragraph, I couldn't read any more. I couldn't believe it. I'm still pinching myself. It was a lovely surprise and a very great honour. 'When I became artistic director, the festival was facing many challenges and I believe we met all those challenges and left the festival on a more secure footing for the future. 'One of the things I am proudest of was developing the educational element of the festival, giving children a stake and being part of it. They are the performers and the audience of the future. 'They won't forget the experience of playing on the festival stage with professional musicians or coming to the festival to work on different projects. Among the biggest highlights for me was the 50 th anniversary of the festival which was a major milestone. 'But after two decades, I felt that the time was right for me to step down and give an opportunity for new blood and fresh ideas. The fact that it was the festival that nominated me for this honour means a great deal. I am very grateful to them." Her successor, royal composer Paul Mealor. Ann said: 'I became a vice-president of the festival last year which means that I can continue to be involved. Paul was an inspired choice as the new artistic director and he's doing a fantastic job and putting his own stamp on the festival. "He's ringing the changes but staying true to the core values of the festival.' Headliners this year include the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, world class choral group Apollo5 and the renowned Black Dyke Band. Making her festival debut this year will be the acclaimed film and TV composer, Debbie Wiseman OBE. Her theme tunes for Wolf Hall, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Judge John Deed and many others will be played by the NEW Sinfonia orchestra. Another highlight this year will be the second Pendine Young Musician of Wales competition that was launched last year and is being funded by the Pendine Arts and Community Trust set up by the festival's headline sponsors, the Pendine Park care organisation. The final concert will feature the North Wales Choral Union and Orchestra under the baton of conductor Trystan Lewis. Also returning will be the festival fringe which Paul Mealor introduced as a new element last year to create closer links with the local community in St Asaph. The fringe events will include a cabaret and American song night, stand-up comedy, and a poetry night led by one of Wales's greatest poets, Mererid Hopwood, the current Archdruid of Wales. Paul Mealor paid tribute to Ann's 'immense contribution'. He said: 'Ann is a friendly force of nature and a legend of music and the arts in Wales. "We are indebted to her for turning the festival into an event that has established itself as a highlight of the UK's cultural calendar. I will be forever grateful to Ann for the help and wise advice she has given to me after taking the helm, making the transition as smooth as possible. 'We are delighted her achievements have been recognised with the MBE - it is richly deserved'. It's the latest in a long line of accolades for Ann, who lives near Corwen, and has variously been described as a 'force of nature' and a 'legend of the classical music scene' in North Wales. A celebrated mezzo soprano in her own right, Ann has sung with many of Britain's leading opera companies, including Scottish Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Wexford Festival Opera. From 2002 to 2009 Ann was also Musical Director of the Fron Male Choir who found fame and became known as the "Oldest Boy Band in the World" releasing several albums which topped the classical charts for a record 16 weeks. Ann was honoured by the Gorsedd of Bards at the 2009 National Eisteddfod in Bala and a year later was made an Honorary Fellow at Glyndŵr University. In 2011 she received the Welsh Livery Guild's Merit Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements to the world of music in Wales and beyond. She was once again recognized for her contribution to Welsh Music in 2019 when she received the prestigious Sir Geraint Evans Award from the Welsh Music Guild in Cardiff. Three years ago Ann received an honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in recognition of her contribution to music. Ann is still busy as the musical director of two male voice choirs, Côr Meibion Trelawnyd and Côr Meibion Bro Glyndwr and is a singing tutor to a host of young, up and coming soloists.
The Herald Scotland
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
A bold concert with a mighty juggernaut
Keith Bruce five stars THE RSNO's Music Director Thomas Sondergard has form with Shostakovich, and especially the mighty juggernaut that is the composer's Symphony No 11, 'The Year 1905'. It was the work he conducted as a late replacement for Alexander Lazarev in 2009, beginning his relationship with the orchestra, and the one with which he made a significant impression on metropolitan critics conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the London Proms. This concert boldly placed the work at the end of an all-Shostakovich programme that began with the exuberant Festive Overture of a few years previously, and featured the much chewier Cello Concerto No 2 of a decade later, with Daniel Muller-Schott the guest soloist. Read More Review: Bruce Springsteen, Anfield, Liverpool Review, Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh: 'a mesmerising depiction' Review: Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed, Pitlochry Festival Theatre The RSNO was rewarded with a very well-filled auditorium for its season-closer, a result few might have predicted and which should give the management food for thought. Especially gratifying must surely have been the rapt concentration given to the concerto, composed for Rostropovich and much thornier than his first concerto for his illustrious countryman. Muller-Schott brought the required powerful intensity to the work, his solo introductions to the movements absolutely compelling. It is a huge work for the cellist, but the details of his exchanges with the orchestra were just as memorable. The RSNO's horns and the percussion team were superb, and the classic combination of harp and flute later provided a moment of calm reassurance in an anxious piece. Muller-Schott added a palate-cleansing encore of Bach to send the audience into the interval, but echoes of the opening of the concerto with the start of the symphony were still apparent after it. The RSNO strings on the platform were a mixture of well-known, recently returned and new faces but the sound was richly familiar and focused. The dynamic flexibility of the modern RSNO is not all of Sondergard's making, but he drives this orchestra with great skill and not a detail of the composer's score, in all its programmatic ambiguity, was left on the page. If the opening overture's boisterous celebration of the October Revolution sounds uncharacteristically straightforward, everything that followed was less concerned with decoding the composer's vexed relationship with the Russian authorities than with making the best possible case for his music. As Lazarev has said, and Sondergard would surely agree, that is exactly as it should be.
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
BBCNOW/MacMillan/Childs review – James MacMillan's nostalgic celebration of the euphonium
Named for the sweet euphony of its tone, the euphonium is proving itself outside the brass band world and coming into its own in contemporary repertoire. Much music for euphonium is commissioned by David Childs, one of the instrument's strongest and most gifted advocates – his whole family veritable champions – the latest being James MacMillan's new concertante work for euphonium and string orchestra. Its title, Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, refers to the confluence of river and tributary in the Ayrshire town of the Cumnock where MacMillan spent his early years. It is dedicated to Childs and to the composer's euphonium-playing grandfather, George Loy; an element of nostalgia is thus imbued in the piece's character, evident from the opening solo statement – slow, lyrical and reflective. Yet the fast scale passages that emerged from the strings like eddying ripples and were quickly taken up by Childs signalled the soloist's virtuosity immediately. It was this balance of arching melody and increasing rhythmic vitality that drove the performance, the absence of other wind instruments ensuring the soloist never risked being compromised. Only a long, expansive phrase with euphonium and strings in unison was curious for being undeniably rich but somehow not entirely convincing. The piece had its premiere the previous night in Cardiff's Hoddinott Hall, but the Swansea audience surely got the better experience, the warmth and finesse of Childs' playing and the burnished strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales wonderfully resonant in the Brangwyn Hall. MacMillan conducted with a composer's authority, and it was with a composer's sympathy that he approached the other works in this wide-ranging programme, ostensibly embracing folk inflections. In the case of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, those inflections are imagined rather than authentic but evocative nevertheless, and eloquently realised by the BBCNOW winds. Stravinsky's later Symphony in Three Movements, with its mix of strident energy and longing for his Russian past, had great verve. But the threads of melancholy in Gustav Holst's Capriccio, and then in Vaughan Williams's early tone-poem In the Fen Country, also had their own impact. So this was quite a workout for the emotions, all told. The Cardiff performance is available on BBC Sounds until 2 June.
Western Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Western Telegraph
St Davids Cathedral Music Festival's 2025 programme
The annual St Davids Cathedral Music Festival, now in its 44th year, will take place during the May half-term from May 23 to 29. The festival will begin with a launch concert featuring 120 schoolchildren from across the county, led by conductor Suzzie Vango. A highlight of the festival programme is the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, performing on Saturday, May 24. This year, the orchestra will be conducted by Kristian Sallinen from Finland. Their 2025 programme will include Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 'From the New World', Grace Williams' Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, and Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures, sung by BBC Cardiff Singer of the World finalist Claire Barnett-Jones. Pembrokeshire-born pianist and conductor Jocelyn Freeman will be the Artist in Residence, performing in three concerts. On Sunday evening, she will join the Alkyona String Quartet for a performance of Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet and Ravel's String Quartet. On Bank Holiday Monday, she will join Vox Angelica and the Vicars Choral as a guest soloist for an evening of choral music and madrigals. The same day, tuba player Aled Meredith-Barrett will perform with his brass quintet Connaught Brass, in a programme featuring music from West Side Story and the UK premiere of a new work by American composer Carlos Simon. On Tuesday, Jocelyn Freeman will perform with tenor James Gilchrist and his students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in a concert entitled 'A Poet's Love'. The concert will celebrate the work of Dylan Thomas with settings of his poetry by William Mathias, Rhian Samuel, and Meirion Williams. To close the festival, vocal sextet the Queen's Six will present their programme 'Mapping the Stars', featuring music by Monteverdi and Taverner, alongside arrangements of contemporary hits such as Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' and Starship's 'We Built This City on Rock and Roll.' Tickets for the 2025 festival are on sale now. For more information, visit the cathedral website.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Missa Solemnis review – glorious and memorable Beethoven
Beethoven believed his Missa Solemnis to be his best work, a labour of love and faith. Conceived on a symphonic scale, the huge demands this great and weightiest of choral masterpieces makes on his voices, treating them as instruments, are a deterrent to any but the finest choruses. Here, under the baton of Andrew Manze, the fearless and very fine BBC National Chorus of Wales – schooled by chorus director Adrian Partington – acquitted themselves admirably. They tackled the high tessitura, notably the sopranos, and the tricky fugal writing with impunity and remarkable stamina. In the context of Llandaff Cathedral, despite their slightly awkward placement in the choir stalls behind Jacob Epstein's Majestas, they maximised the resonance and, in the parts of the mass whose prevailing mood is not at all solemn, were joyful and exultant. Yet it was the exceptional quality of the solo quartet – treated by Beethoven as a micro-chorus, without any individual arias and set against the body of massed voices – that allowed the music's complex structure to emerge clearly. Soprano Carolyn Sampson, mezzo Sophie Harmsen, tenor Ed Lyon and bass Darren Jeffery were particularly well-matched in terms of vivid projection and richness of tone. In music as testing as any key operatic role, they nevertheless blended together, each ceding one to the other, in the manner of a string quartet, with Sampson soaring gloriously high in crowning passages. At the heart of the Sanctus section, the Benedictus is simply extraordinary. In it, these four voices realised a sublime expressive beauty, heightened by Beethoven's interpolation of an ethereal solo violin, weaving in and around the vocal lines, perhaps inspired by the example of Bach and wonderfully played here by leader Lesley Hatfield. Eloquent playing by principals in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales also marked this memorable evening. There may have been the odd quibble about the occasional loss of detail in the overall wealth of sound, but this was a performance whose broadcast on Radio 3 next week should not be missed. On BBC Radio 3 on Maundy Thursday, 17 April
