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Ryedale Festival review — extraordinary music in England's grandest homes
Ryedale Festival review — extraordinary music in England's grandest homes

Times

time17-07-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Times

Ryedale Festival review — extraordinary music in England's grandest homes

Running for 17 days across North Yorkshire from Skipton to Scarborough, the Ryedale Festival has expanded greatly in recent years. Architecturally, it encompasses some of the grandest stately homes in England as well as beautiful churches. Musically, it presents a healthy variety of styles and performers, with Eric Whitacre, Kate Rusby, Stephen Hough and Jess Gillam all appearing this week or next. That nearly 12,000 tickets have been sold for this year's festival attests to the shrewd programming instincts of Christopher Glynn, the pianist who is Ryedale's artistic director. And he doesn't play safe either. He was part of the ensemble for an extraordinary concert on Wednesday afternoon in Pickering Church. Mingling the music of Michael Tippett with that of Tippett's baroque hero, Henry Purcell, it ended with a rare performance of Tippett's disarmingly idiosyncratic 1958 chamber cantata Crown of the Year. • Read more classical reviews, guides and interviews Setting a celebratory text by Christopher Fry, it deploys a unique combination of instruments (including handbells and recorders) to create a web of plangent polyphony into which Tippett weaves numerous allusions to folk tunes. Three singers (here the sopranos Claire Booth and Rowan Pierce and the countertenor Alexander Chance) deliver the text, often in close harmony. Some of the vocal writing is reminiscent of Tippett's opera The Midsummer Marriage, and there's that same feeling of slightly mystifying joyousness. One imagines listeners in the Fifties and Sixties greeting it with an approving murmur of 'far out, man'. I loved it, which perhaps dates me as well. Pierce and Tippett's biographer Oliver Soden were the excellent speakers in Tippett's scarcely less quirky Words for Music Perhaps, reciting Yeats's image-infused poems between Tippett's equally characterful instrumental responses. All the singers also ranged through a selection of Purcell songs (Pierce in particular finding the perfect blend of tonal beauty and incisive enunciation), and — the final atmospheric touch in an intriguing programme — two recorder players popped up around the church performing Tippett's strange but haunting Inventions between the bigger pieces. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews I wasn't so impressed by Wednesday evening's concert: the veteran Austrian ensemble Quatuor Mosaiques playing last quartets by Haydn and Schubert. The tone was wiry, the rapport imprecise, though there was vigour in the playing. But at least it was a chance to gawp at the solemn splendour of the drawing room at Duncombe Park, a stately home usually closed to the public.★★★★☆Festival continues to Jul 27, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews

Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre
Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre

Sydney Morning Herald

time25-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • Sydney Morning Herald

Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre

Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre took a deep breath and pitched his germ of a musical idea to the head of London's BBC Proms. 'It would be Vangelis meets Thomas Tallis,″⁣ he says. To his surprise, his proposed marriage of electronica and 16th-century vocal music got the thumbs up. Eternity in an Hour debuted at the Royal Albert Hall last year and is poised to make its Australian premiere with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Whitacre is a musical rarity: a popular, highly regarded composer, conductor and performer who straddles the divide between classical and contemporary music. He has an aura of rock star glamour as crosses his Sydney hotel foyer in black jeans and sweater. With collar-length hair and chiselled good looks – he could be Sting's much younger brother – he looks more the techno band member he once was than a conductor at home on podiums around the globe. It's the third time he has worked with the Philharmonia's young adult ensemble VOX, who co-commissioned the piece with the Proms and Flemish Radio Choir. Whitacre will perform a range of electronics while conducting the work also scored for choir, piano and cello. Its title is based on a stanza from William Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. Whitacre first read the poem in his early 20s and admires its eloquent meditation on impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things.

Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre
Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre

The Age

time25-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • The Age

Composer, conductor, Buddhist and model: Inside the restless mind of Eric Whitacre

Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre took a deep breath and pitched his germ of a musical idea to the head of London's BBC Proms. 'It would be Vangelis meets Thomas Tallis,″⁣ he says. To his surprise, his proposed marriage of electronica and 16th-century vocal music got the thumbs up. Eternity in an Hour debuted at the Royal Albert Hall last year and is poised to make its Australian premiere with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Whitacre is a musical rarity: a popular, highly regarded composer, conductor and performer who straddles the divide between classical and contemporary music. He has an aura of rock star glamour as crosses his Sydney hotel foyer in black jeans and sweater. With collar-length hair and chiselled good looks – he could be Sting's much younger brother – he looks more the techno band member he once was than a conductor at home on podiums around the globe. It's the third time he has worked with the Philharmonia's young adult ensemble VOX, who co-commissioned the piece with the Proms and Flemish Radio Choir. Whitacre will perform a range of electronics while conducting the work also scored for choir, piano and cello. Its title is based on a stanza from William Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. Whitacre first read the poem in his early 20s and admires its eloquent meditation on impermanence and the interconnectedness of all things.

Choral Composer Eric Whitacre
Choral Composer Eric Whitacre

ABC News

time24-06-2025

  • Entertainment
  • ABC News

Choral Composer Eric Whitacre

Classic Drive's Vanessa Hughes speaks with choral composer and conductor Eric Whitacre about his unexpected journey into the world of choirs, sparked by a reluctant teenage encounter with a Mozart piece that ultimately transformed him into a self-proclaimed choir obsessive. Though he hadn't originally planned to write for choirs, that experience set the course for his career—and now, having seen his Virtual Choir go viral (ten years before pandemic lockdowns made virtual group performances widespread), he is one of the most commissioned and performed choral composers in the world. Whitacre also spills the beans on which section of a standard choir truly reigns supreme—who's the cleverest, the most overlooked: the basses, altos, sopranos, or tenors? Eric Whitacre will conduct the Australian premiere of his new work Eternity in an Hour at the Sydney Opera House with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs' VOX chorus on Friday 27 June.

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