performingartsincornwall

  Julien van Mallaerts and Tim Dean gave a highly entertaining and beautifully crafted song recital at the Chapel Street Methodist Chapel series in Penzance on 29th May 2022. An enthusiastic audience gathered to hear a programme of English song including well known settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams on Sunday afternoon as part of the Piano Go Round series of concerts. So much of the enjoyment in a song recital is to be had from the presence and drive of the performers and right from the opening thrills and whistles of Britten's Plough Boy and Oliver Cromwell contrasted with Sally Gardens, the audience was riveted with a presentation that was always entertaining.. This is a rich voice but also very subtle with wonderful diction and superb pianissimo, bringing to the performance of well known folk song repertoire a freshness which sparked interest which kept us on the edge of our chairs wanting more of the superb top range...but never overblown. Julien had just

Ruth Wall gives recital on four harps in Gerrans Parish Hall, accompanied by Graham Fitkin. There were over 100 strings in total requiring careful tuning before, and during the concert which ace harpist Ruth Wall gave on Friday 9 th December at Gerrans Memorial Hall. Ruth’s  programme took as its broad theme Migration and she chose a remarkable variety of strands to captivate the audience – the programme was both highly creative and a spur to the imagination. There were four distinctive harps she played, the traditional clearsach, the bray harp, electro-acoustic harp, and a lever harp. While Ruth Wall lives in Cornwall she  has mined the stories and music from her native Sutherland, and in particular the Highland clearances for the thread that she wove through this programme.    Her partner the composer, Graham Fitkin who was accompanying her adapted tunes from bagpipe music books and these were then  interwoven with looping techniques to create new sound worlds.  For example a record

Kath Archer the theatre director and her team Touch Theatre have pulled off another stunning and revelatory play  Dennis Kelly’s Girls  & Boys (following their last production of The Welkin by Lucy Kirkwood)  for audiences in Cornwall interested in adult contemporary theatre.  We saw it tonight in the inappropriately named (but locally well supported) venue the Temperance Hall in Penryn.  This is a play littered and revelling in slaggy language that is shocking, sexy and honest, describing a woman  who wants to count and is determined to get ahead and live life as an equal . But  while she gets what she wants the plot  veers and shape shifts.  Relationships which start out passionate and hot, morph to the contented but steady, motherhood rewards, power shifts, disillusion and  violence intervene.    A  superb performance (it’s a one woman show) as The Woman by Emma Phillips matched with great direction (Kath Archer) , a smart set with a revolve(!), soundtrack ( I love the piano)  a

What's wrong with old-fashioned entertainment.....Answer absolutely nothing!   This concert by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Brass and Woodwind Sections was a model of exactly that.  The programme (see below) didn't perhaps have  the same gravitas as exemplified by the Sibelius Second Symphony the full orchestra had played under the baton of Kirill Karavits the night before to a packed house at the Hall for Cornwall.  But it was stylish,  hugely polished and beautifully executed.  And let's face it any programme which includes a Leonard Berstein score is going to produce a lot of fireworks and excitement.   As the players clicked their fingers to get us into the mood of the West Side of New York, the menace of the scrap to come was palpable and the sheer joy of wonderful, gripping, rhythmic energy pulsed through the hall.   Here is a paean to the art of the arranger too.   Because on the evidence of this concert there are some very clever musicians weaving some nifty l

 Roseland Music Society Cornwall Cello Voices  11th February 2022 Barbara Degener:  Leader Liz Brazier Susanna Campbell Ben Hoadley Tim Pratt Giovanni Gabrieli                    Canzona Seconda  arr. Nick Halsey Henry Purcell                         Fantasia no 3 arranged by D. Moore J.S.Bach                               Three movements From Suite in G major                                                       Prelude - Sarabande - Gigu F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy     Andate for organ arr O Mandozzi Franz Schubert                    Allegro moderato from Sonata for Four Hands G. Valensin                         Menuet:  arr G. Piatigorsky 4 American Folksongs     arr, Wendy Bissinger A. Villoldo                         El Chachoritto  arr. W.Birtel J.S> Bach                              Chorale "Der Christ"  arr. J.Navascues D. Popper                              Requiem op. 66 D. Johnstone                         Argencello  Marie    Dare                         Elegy G.

 The play the Welkin by Lucy Kirkwood was presented by The Gweek Players and Touch Theatre in September 2021 We are transported to rural Norfolk in mid 18th century England - where a heinous murder has taken place where a man aided and abetted by his mistress have murdered the young daughter of a local lady who had been consigned to the young woman's care.   Justice is perfunctory - the perpetrators were apprehended covered in the innocent's blood and proof seems undisputed and sufficient for the judges to convict more or less immediately and send the condemned to a spectacle at the local gibbet.    The crowd heaves outside as the condemned man is duly hung from the gibbet, meanwhile within a procedural problem arises as the young woman condemned as an accomplice is heard to claim she is "quick with child".  The law does not allow an innocent child to die in the womb and will transmute the sentence if the condemned woman is found to be pregnant, so the bailiff is inst