Reluctant as one is to promote oneself, I stumbled into a very nice conversation with the Carrefour Chamber Music Project, of Shreveport, Louisiana, and we all thought you might enjoy having a look at the result. Plus you get to see more of my workroom than perhaps you may ever have expected to see, including my Stetson, duly acquired and hand-shaped in San Antonio, Texas, and the U.S. Army Sweetheart pillow my Daddy sent my Mama while he was posted at Camp Blandings, Florida, during World War II.
Carrefour’s posting of the video is here, and we’ve added it to our Gallery here. Both postings have links to other activities of this impressive operation.
Never a dull moment, indeed! All kinds of online goodies over the next few weeks, including:
September 15: Chicago’s International Music Festival presents a smashing pair—Clarke’s Trio and Dinuk Wijeratne’s Love Triangle—performed by Janet Sung, Calum Cook, and Kuang-Hao Huang, at 5:45 p.m. Central Daylight Time (check here for your local equivalent). “Smashing,” quite literally—it’s hard to guess which of these pieces has the hardest knuckles, and one of them turned 99 years old six weeks ago.
On demand through October 6: The Archipelago Collective’s entire 2020 season, including a beautiful performance of Clarke’s Lullaby and Grotesque, can be had here for a mere $50, and educators may request free access here.
On demand through October 8: BBC’s Through the Night is rebroadcasting a riveting 2008 mini-recital of Clarke’s songs by Elizabeth Watts and Paul Turner (beginning at the 3:34:26 mark), and you need to catch it before it disappears back into the vault for another dozen years. Forget the academic canard that there was something small or in-turned about Clarke’s predilection for songs: Watts and Turner find real tragedy in Down by the Salley Gardens and A Dream, a flash of Isolde-like passion in Greeting, and very nearly the last ounce of horror in Eight O’clock. As my Alabama grandmother would have put it, this is sangin’!
October 12–November 1: Oxford Lieder offers exactly the sort of mixed grill Clarke and her buddies enjoyed serving up—in this case, voice (mezzo Caitlin Hulcup), violin (Jonathan Stone), and piano (artistic director Sholto Kynoch) in various combinations and permutations. There’s only one piece by Clarke—”The Tailor and His Mouse,” from Old English Songs, for voice and violin—but context is everything, and the program as a whole is wildly imaginative. Broadcast live from Holywell Music Room on October 12, at 17:30 British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent), and then available on demand, with the same ticket, through November 1. £10 / £5 under 35.
October 27–28: And talk about wildly imaginative programming! Cultural Wasteland presents Danse macabre: Musical Tales of Horror from Rebecca Clarke, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns, with mezzo Heather Gallagher and pianist Yukiko Oba. The ample bill of fare includes five Clarke songs: The Seal Man; A Dream; Tiger, Tiger; The Donkey; and the rarely-heard Binnorie: A Ballad, an epic tale of love, jealousy, murder, and revenge, with enough creepy effects slithering out of the piano to give you a fabulous case of the wim-wams, just in time for Halloween. All that, plus an opportunity to hear Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and Berlioz’s Le Spectre de la rose in their original forms, for voice and piano. $20 on Sparrow Live, airing Tuesday, October 27, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and then available for the next 24 hours (check here for your local equivalents, and please note that this is the correct date and time). We’ve already got our tickets. See you there. Bring popcorn.
Save the dates! On October 29, Clarke’s Trio headlines a concert in Wigmore Hall’s terrific new Live Stream series, 95 years (nearly to the day) after Clarke herself presented it there, with the Gould Trio stepping in for the original cast of characters: Adila Fachiri, May Mukle, and Myra Hess. The Sonata follows on December 8, with Natalie Clein performing Clarke’s alternate version for cello. Details to follow.
This season’s de-facto pan-European Clarke festival takes a slight breather before plunging into November and December’s full-tilt Clarkeapalooza, of which more later. Still, autumn hath its charms, and Clarke continues to find herself in interesting company.
[Apart from the first item, which you can enjoy while sheltering at home, any or all of these events may or may not happen as planned, depending on COVID-19, so check availability and local public-health requirements before setting out.]
September 10: Brexit, schmexit—the BBC is still a global operation, and Clarke was one of its earliest ornaments, so we feel no compunction whatsoever in including it as a way-station on her current Grand Tour, especially as she shuttles through under cover of darkness, at 4:04 a.m. British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent), in the form of a rebroadcast of Elizabeth Watts and Paul Turner‘s performance of A Dream, Eight O’clock, Down by the Salley Gardens, and Greeting, from back in 2008, when Watts and Turner were members of Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme, and not the firmly established figures they are today. The program will be available on demand through October 8.
September 20:Les Vacances de Monsieur Haydn, or “Mr. Haydn’s Vacation”—surely Europe’s most charmingly-named music-festival (tip of the hat to Jacques Tati), and the one with the coolest logo—gives Clarke’s Trio an outing at the Cinéma le Kerlouet, in La Roche-Posay, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France. It sounds like a terrific program, also featuring Mr. Haydn’s Opus 76, No. 5, Mr. Mozart’s Sonata, K. 15, and Mr. Lucas Debargue’s Mélodies sur des poèmes de Baudelaire pour mezzo-soprano et piano, with the exciting (and still controversial) Mr. Debargue himself anchoring the proceedings at the piano.
September 22: Sweden’s acclaimed Malmö SymfoniOrkester kicks off its 2020-21 chamber-music series with a program featuring Clarke’s Morpheus and Passacaglia on an Old English Tune, performed by co-principal violist Gunnar Jedvik and pianist Jan Karlsson Korp. The concert also includes Bruch’s Eight Pieces, Op. 83, and Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” trio, with Jedvik, Korp, and clarinetist Anders Eriksson.
October 16: A mere 596 kilometers up the road from Malmö—it’s a big country—mezzo-soprano Emelie Thoor and pianist Olga Tomilina perform Clarke’s The Cloths of Heaven and Down by the Salley Gardens, in a lunchtime concert at the Konserthus recital hall in Västerås. The bill of fare includes songs by Alma Mahler, Amy Beach, and Richard Strauss, and a premiere by Joel Engström, whose rhythmic panache Clarke would have admired (not to mention those smoking glissandi!). Tickets and mouth-watering restaurant-reservations may be had here.
October 20: The tenth-anniversary season of Festival Présences Féminines offers a fascinating program by violist Isabel Villanueva and pianist François Dumont, at the Musée National de la Marine, in Toulon, France. In addition to Clarke’s « très belle sonate pour alto et piano » the program includes works by three living composers: Édith Canat de Chizy’s En bleu et or, Dobrinka Tabakova’s Suite en jazz style, and the world premiere of Golfram Khayam’s Ritornello pour alto seul.
Eighty to one hundred years after their composition, it’s striking how often—and how naturally and comfortably—Clarke’s pieces sit alongside the latest and the freshest, from whatever part of the world. Debargue and Engström are just thirty years old, Tabakova and Khayam are not much older, and Canat de Chizy is « un poulet de l’année » next to Clarke, who just turned 134. Quite a ride. She would have loved it. Stay tuned.
Rebecca Clarke 