BACKSTAGE WITH… Pianist Iain Burnside
‘Normal service has been resumed’, you write on the website of the Ludlow English Song Weekend, of which you are artistic director. What does ‘normal service’ mean?
Well, we did do a weekend in November to make up for the missing one last spring, but it wasn’t quite the same. The event has been running in one form or another since 2002, and people said back then that there’s not enough repertoire, that we’ll run out of ideas and so on, but it’s amazing how it regenerates with different artists and different enthusiasms. The problem for me artistic director is, in fact, being selective and not having too many ideas!
Although the event has ‘English Song’ in its title, it’s not just restricted to that in this year’s programme, is it?
No. Baritone Benjamin Appl’s ‘My Own Country’ recital on the Saturday morning is something of a club sandwich, if you like. The idea there is that we match English songs to German lieder that talk to one another – so, for instance, a Mahler military song would talk to an Arthur Somervell military song. Without wanting to be too dry and didactic, we’ve paired pieces from the two different traditions that have something in common and are so often closer than people might think.
Is this the first occasion on which you have ventured beyond English song, then?
That partly depends on how you define ‘English song’, of course. We’ve had Scottish songs in there in the past, one year we had we had an Irish focus for the whole weekend – which worked brilliantly – and we’ve had American songs too. Though ‘English’ could refer in the broader sense to the language of the songs rather than the country itself, I have to admit that during that Irish weekend we actually had a couple in Gaelic!
Tell us a little about the town and its venues…
Ludlow is the dream place for a little festival like this. It’s very pretty, with lovely coffee and lunch places, and as the two venues are only a leisurely five-minute walk apart, it feels very sociable too. Most of the concerts are in St Laurence’s Church – sometimes described as ‘The Cathedral of the Marches’ – and we also use the Assembly Rooms, which is better for spoken-word events. The poet AE Housman is buried in the churchyard of St Laurence’s, incidentally, so settings of his A Shropshire Lad do crop up in the programme quite often.