Latin vibes, Quaker visitors, quality art and Bach at Festival of Chichester
2021 Festival of Chichester
The Latin Bridge Trio head to the Festival of Chichester for a date at Halnaker Park Cottage Gardens (far end of Park Lane, PO18 OQH) on Sunday, July 4 at 3pm under the Amici Concerts banner.
Amici are promising a summer’s afternoon outdoors with a top Cuban band offering sizzling classic bossa nova, jazz standards, boleros, Cuban son and original compositions.
Sergio Marciano (band leader, lead vocal, guitar) teams up with Fernando Depestre (backing vocal, percussion set) and Frank Portuondo (tres folk Cuban guitar, backing vocals).
Sergio said: “Really we are very excited to play this after the lockdown. It is our first important event. The repertoire is basically Latin classics with some new works and with just a touch of jazz… Cuban and Brazilian classics with that jazz kick.
“The pandemic has been very bad for us. We couldn’t have contact with our audiences, and that was the hardest thing. We couldn’t feel the chillback from the public. We recorded at home and we composed, but really it is not just the same.
“We had some (financial) help from the government. We composed and we recorded through the lockdowns, but it just isn’t as good. We want to be face to face with the audience.”
Parking is available. Bring low-back chairs. Doors open from 1.30pm and feel free to bring a picnic and enjoy the gardens. Tickets are available from the Novium Box Office, Tower Street, Chichester, PO19 1QH; 01243 816525; boxoffice@chichester.gov.uk; https://chichesterboxoffice.ticketsolve.com/ shows/873614216. Maximum audience 100.
The Romantics
Cellist Pavlos Carvalho and pianist Louisa Lam combine to offer The Great Romantics – Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn for this year’s Festival of Chichester.
They will be performing in St Paul’s Church and Parish Centre on July 2 at 7.30pm – one of three contributions to this year’s festival from Pavlos, chamber musician with Ensemble Reza and soloist with orchestras including The Covent Garden Chamber orchestra and Royal Philharmonic.
His musical relationship with Louisa is one he relishes.
“Louisa and I have a long history. She is a wonderful pianist, a wonderful musician. She works mainly at the Guildhall. She is an accompanist, but really that’s not a good term. She is a chamber musician.
“I have known her since when after I left college I went to Ardingly College to teach and she got her first job there. She was teaching in the music department there, and then we lost touch and then we got together again ten years later and we have become really good friends.
“I love working with her. She is one of the most lovely and amazingly elastic and flexible people to work with. You just don’t have to talk much about what you are going to do. She can just follow you. She follows you, and you follow her.
“Sometimes (with an accompanist) you can feel a clash of ideas and you have to sit down and talk them through, but Louisa just feels the music so naturally. She feels what you are going to do. You don’t have to discuss it. She just has such an ear she can just sense it.
“And yet she is so low-key and humble a person that sometimes you just don’t realise how brilliant she is. She is not an eccentric performer but she is a better pianist than many of the solo pianists I have worked with. Everything is in her fingers. She is so graceful and flexible and unassuming that you can easily not realise just how difficult the pieces are that she is playing. It is remarkable. She will play this big epic Trojan piece of music and yet it just happens so easily.
“You have to develop a relationship (with an accompanist), and there are so many brilliant pianists, and I have played with many different ones. And I would say that there are maybe three or four that I have found where you can just sit down and rehearse and it doesn’t seem like rehearsing at all. Every rehearsal with someone like Louisa is not a rehearsal at all. It is all about just playing the music and enjoying the music.”
Quakers
Chichester Quaker Meeting will launch seven podcasts on July 3 as part of the Festival of Chichester.
Spokesman Jenny Cole said: “The launch is planned as a Zoom event thankfully, given the announcement about restrictions on indoor gatherings. Please keep the afternoon free!
“Michael Woolley, who has been mayor of Chichester in his time as a local councillor, will host the hour-long meeting. He will talk briefly about how he became involved with Quaker history before playing three of the short recordings and taking questions.
“The podcasts are offered instead of Michael’s popular walk around Chichester which has featured in previous years of the Festival.
They are mainly about famous Quakers who have visited Chichester, from George Fox to Ian Serraillier, (author of The Silver Sword), including Barton Hack who helped found the city of Adelaide and William Smith who installed the city’s first sewage system.”
Jenny managed the production which keeps Chichester Quakers visible in this pandemic year. Booking details for this free event are through the Festival of Chichester website or directly from eventschiquakers@gmail.com
Little Art Gallery
Artist Frances Knight (June 27-July 4) is exhibiting at The Little Art Gallery, Rookwood Road, West Wittering.
Spokeswoman Linda Foskett said: “Frances has included some coastal and river scenes but also some of her paintings from Provence where the light is so different.
“Frances is a contemporary landscape artist. She likes to paint outside directly from nature, exploring the effects of light, colour and structure on the landscape and then works on larger paintings from these studies once back in the studio. Interested in exploring the junction point between abstraction and representation, she seeks to express an inner dialogue between subjective experience and objective reality.”
Frances said: “I am not so much interested in rendering the surface qualities of a landscape but in conveying the underlying structure, colour and atmosphere.”
Joy of Bach
Pure, cathartic, reflective, they are also fantasy and adventure – and for cellist Pavlos Carvalho they have been an essential companion in life and even more so during the pandemic.
Pavlos is delighted to be returning to the Festival of Chichester once again this year to offer a concert of Bach Cello Suites. His solo recital will be in St Paul’s Church and Parish Centre on July 5 at 1pm.
As Pavlos says, the beauty and the perpetual sense of discovery that these solo cello suites bring with every performance have never ceased to capture the imagination of performers and listeners alike throughout the 300 years since they were composed.
They are a source of limitless imagination, comfort, spirituality and simple beauty that speak to both the most innocent ears of a young child and the most experienced, seasoned musician.
As Pavlos says, however many times Bach’s cello suites are performed and heard, they never cease to surprise with the freshness and the fantasy of their creation.
Pavlos labels them “the most faithful constant companion.”
“And I think Bach has taken on a new meaning in this time of isolation. For a cellist it is one of the rare bodies of work that you can play completely alone. You don’t need anybody else. They are a wonderful companion. It is just you and them. You don’t need a pianist. You don’t need anyone.
“And it has been amazing to rediscover them during the pandemic. It has saved me. When everything closed down, I could still sit and play them, a singular experience.
“And it has been therapeutic in the sense that it has taken on new meaning. Bach has always had this cathartic element, whether it is catharsis from all of the other big works, the Dvoraks and so on, or whether you have just had a rough day and wanted something that is not too noisy, something you can just breathe with. You can feel alone musically and you pick up Bach and then suddenly you are not alone. It is so spiritual. It is time to reflect away from whatever else is happening. It is the faithful companion that never leaves your side. And I have certainly felt that more strongly during the pandemic.”
Doubtless the pandemic will have changed things in other ways. Pavlos wonders whether concerts might somehow be less precious now. Pavlos worked online extensively throughout the pandemic and noticed that some of the formality of the concert format had disappeared, suddenly inappropriate to online performance.
“Musicians have been talking more to their audiences, and I think there is value in that. It breaks the ice, and I think musicians might bring that more now to the (live) concert platform. Taking away the preciousness is a good thing. People have loved the online concerts with the chitchat and banter.”
And as Pavlos says, well, if people want to clap between movements – something so often frowned upon – then why not. There will always be times when a performer will ask for it not to happen, times when the silence between movements is actually part of the performance.
But there are other times when Pavlos would welcome spontaneous audience response: “If I hear clapping then it gives me confidence and a boost and raises my performance because I know it is being appreciated. It can be a very good thing, and I do think that that’s one of the things that might change in the future.”