Radlett Music Club 2020 - 21
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  • Past Seasons
    • 2019 - 2020 Season >
      • JOHN SUCHET Tchaikovsky - The Man Revealed - Thursday 10 October 2019
      • ELYSIUM BRASS QUINTET - Tuesday 12 November 2019
      • JOHN LENEHAN - piano - Sunday 12 January 2020
      • BELL STRING QUARTET - Wednesday 5 February 2020
      • CANCELLED - DUO ANTIPODES - Tuesday 17 March 2020
      • CANCELLED - THEO PLATT - KEVAL SHAH- Wednesday 29 April 2020
      • 2019 - 2020 Season Leaflet
    • 2018 - 2019 Season >
      • Season Leaflet
      • Jayson Gillham - piano - Tuesday 23 October 2018
      • The Ruisi Quartet - Tuesday 13 November 2018
      • The Lydian String - Sunday 13 January 2019 at 3pm
      • Solarek Piano Trio - Thursday 7 February 2019
      • Cristian Sandrin - piano - Tuesday 12 March 2019
      • Divertimenti String Quintet - piano - Wednesday 3 April 2019
    • 2017 - 2018 Season >
      • Season Leaflet
      • ENSEMBLE MIRAGE - Wednesday 4 October 2017
      • OLIVER WASS & LUBA TUNNICLIFFE (harp & viola) - Wednesday 22 November 2017
      • GUITARRISIMA (5 girls - 5 guitars, from Vienna)​ - Sunday 21 January 2018
      • GILDAS QUARTET - Tuesday 20 February 2018
      • POMEGRANATE PIANO TRIO - Tuesday 13 March 2018
      • MARTIN KASIK (piano) - Wednesday 18 April 2018
    • 2016 - 2017 Season >
      • Season Leaflet
      • FITZWILLIAM STRING QUARTET - 18th October 2016
      • MISHKA MOMEN - Tuesday 28th November 2016
      • RUTH SCHULTEN (WILLIAMS) AND FRIENDS
      • JAYSON GILLHAM
      • FUJITA PIANO TRIO
      • SHE’KOYOKH KLEZMER GROUP
    • 2015 - 2016 Season >
      • Season Leaflet
      • JOHN SUCHET - Wednesday 21 October 2015
      • GALLIARD WIND ENSEMBLE - Tuesday 24 November 2015
      • WERTHER ENSEMBLE - Thursday 28 January 2016
      • TOM POSTER - Tuesday 23 February 2016
      • JANE LINDSAY - JENNIFER HUGHES - Wednesday 16 March 2016
      • 4 GIRLS 4 HARPS - Thursday April 21 2016
    • 2014 - 2015 Season >
      • Season Leaflet 2014-2015
      • David Owen Norris - Tuesday 21st October 2014
      • Pomegranate Trio - Wednesday 26th November 2014
      • Herschel Baroque Trio - Thursday 22nd January 2015
      • Manus Noble - Wednesday 25 February 2015
      • Krysia Osostowicz, Daniel Tong - Tuesday 17 March 2015
      • Benyounes Quartet, David Campbell - Thursday 16 April 2015,
    • 2013 - 2014 Season >
      • Season Leaflet 2013-2014
      • Sacconi String Quartet - Tuesday 22 October 2013
      • Lara Melda - piano - Wednesday 27 November 2013
      • Students from the Purcell School - Tuesday 21st January 2014
      • She'Koyokh - Klezmer Group - Tuesday 25 February 2014
      • Chamber Philharmonic of Europe - Wednesday 19 March 2014
      • Lucy Hall - soprano & Gavin Roberts - piano - Thursday 10 April 2014
    • 2012 - 2013 Season >
      • HELEN & HARVEY DAVIES - Tuesday 16 October 2012
      • NATALIE CLEIN, KATYA APEKISHEVA - Wednesday 28 November 2012
      • PRIMAVERA ENSEMBLE - Tuesday 29 January 2013
      • JUDITH HALL and CRAIG OGDEN - Wednesday 20 February 2013
      • DANTE STRING QUARTET - Tuesday 12 March 2013
      • PETER FACER and CHRISTOPHER GUILD - Thursday 18 April 2013
      • Season Leaflet
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David Owen Norris 
Mendelssohn – a lecture recital

Tuesday 21st October 2014, 8 pm at the Radlett Centre
The melodies of the composer’s ‘Songs without words’ act like a language. David Owen Norris examines this rhetorical musical language and explores its secret syntax.

Why does Mendelssohn use the emphatic dynamic mark sf so often? – about five times more frequently than Chopin, and twice or three times as often as Schumann. And why does he use the word crescendo and the hairpin mark that means the same thing, at one and the same time? And why does he sometimes write (in Italian) ‘get louder … and louder still … and still louder … till fortissimo’, when he could just write crescendo? David Owen Norris’s answers to these questions transform how he plays Mendelssohn.

Norris believes that Mendelssohn was creating a new musical syntax, related not so much to Song, like a Mozart slow movement or a Chopin cantilena, as to Rhetorical Speech. Mendelssohn is one of few composers who could speak six languages, and his writing in the Songs without Words works like a language, but not like any existing spoken language, which is why the frequent attempts to add actual words to the pieces have always been so unsuccessful. The hidden meanings of Mendelssohn’s expression marks twist the phrase like an orator – dwelling on a thought, repeating it with new emphasis, now sketching a simile even as he speaks, now sweeping to a climax: a new way of relating music and language. To borrow a phrase from Charles Lamb’s Essay, Dream Children (1823): ‘ …without speech, [they] strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech.’ In this connexion, it’s interesting to consider the crucial sentence of Steven Pinker’s book, The Language Instinct (1995): ‘People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache: they think in a language of thought’ (page 81). Perhaps Mendelssohn’s musical syntax could tap this universal Chomskyian grammar, once we’ve learned how to listen to it.

David Owen Norris is a pianist, broadcaster and composer. His oratorio Prayerbook will appear in November on CD.  The Sunday Times said, “Sign this man up for a series” after his celebrated deconstruction of ‘Jerusalem’ in the Prince of Wales’s television programme about Sir Hubert Parry.  His work as a concert pianist has taken him round the world for forty years – “Quite possibly the most interesting pianist in the world!” said the Toronto Globe & Mail.  His latest piano solo CD received a double-five-star review in BBC Music Magazine. He is currently working on an app for iPad on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
 

He was Organ Scholar at Keble College, Oxford, leaving with a First in Music and a Composition Scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won the Dove Prize, and privately in Paris. He was a repetiteur at the Royal Opera House, harpist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Artistic Director of the Petworth Festival & the Cardiff International Festival, Gresham Professor of Music, and Chairman of the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Organists, and an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
Non-member admission charge for this concert - £14.

Free admission for young people.
The Club is aided by the CAVATINA Chamber Music Trust and is pleased to offer
free admission to young people aged 8 to 25 years of age.
Children must be accompanied by an adult.

The Radlett Centre at 1 Aldenham Avenue, Radlett, WD7 8HL
is in the centre of Radlett with free evening parking nearby.
Box Office: 01923 859291. Online booking: Purchase.Tickets.com (Radlett Centre)
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