Welcome to my website. Perhaps you’ve arrived here because you’ve been to one of my concerts. Maybe you’re a musician yourself and we’ve worked together or have plans to do so. However you got here, I hope that the website will tell you a little more about me, and encourage you to come along to a concert.
As the recession begins to bite, musicians are having to be ever more adventurous and versatile, and I’m thrilled that my various organizations are meeting that challenge. Operamus, which honoured me recently by making me its Patron, is extending its community work and hoping shortly to commission a new opera. The various orchestras I conduct are succeeding in keeping their programming adventurous while still maintaining a solid audience base. My choir in Nottingham is cementing links with the Hallé, and my Leicester choir is being extraordinarily inventive despite budgetary restraints. We have to move with the times – gone are the days when performers could get by without constantly re-examining their roles, merely recycling the great works of Beethoven and Brahms, though they still have an important place. New challenges have presented me and my colleagues with exciting collaborative opportunities, and have encouraged fresh thinking about repertoire. I’m pleased that nowadays half of my conducting work is music from within the last hundred years, which I find speaks most directly to audiences, with highlights this season including Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, Prokofiev Classical Symphony, Ivor McGregor’s Symphony no.1 and Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil. A monster concert in Nottingham in March features Bax, Parry, Vaughan Williams and Delius along with that charming little miniature by Walton, Belshazzar’s Feast. In future seasons I’m planning music by some of my favourite contemporary composers like John Adams and Carl Rütti, along with music by Ives, Kodaly, Ketelbey, Poulenc, Howells, Britten, Whitacre and Arthur Benjamin.
On the home front Elsa is now two and doing all the things for which two year-olds are infamous. She is currently obsessed with stickers. We have also grown used to her shouted demands to “Sing it!” and are inspired by her boundless energy. Meanwhile, Karen had a successful paper at a conference in Toronto in the summer, and more publications are in the offing as she continues her post-doc work at Cambridge. Occasionally we all get to see each other!
Do come along to one of my concerts – live music is the most thrilling experience for me, and, I hope, for the audience. For me, something special happens in concerts, in the mystical space between composer, performer and listener, and I hope I can share that experience with you.
