Wyn Davies was born in South Wales. Since his début with Welsh National Opera, he has conducted most major British opera companies and many orchestras including the Hallé, the Northern Sinfonia and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

He spent two years at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and two seasons in Canada where he conducted an award-winning production of Weill’s Threepenny Opera in Toronto. He was appointed Director of Music to New Zealand Opera in 2005.

In Britain, he conducts regularly at the Buxton Festival. He is also a noted pianist and cabaret performer. Other notable projects include Kern’s SHOW BOAT for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Opera North, on tour and in the West End; Animated Operas and the Theresienstadt children’s opera Brundibar for S4C television. Wyn Davies has prepared performing editions of works as diverse as L’incoronazione Di Poppea and The Beggars' Opera.

Future plans include productions for the English National Opera, Opera North and Scottish Opera.

Piers Lane  - piano

London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane has a flourishing international career which has taken him to more than forty countries. In the past few years, his engagements have included concerto performances at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; a three-recital series called Metamorphoses at London’s Wigmore Hall; the Opening recital of the Sydney International Piano Competition; concerto appearances with the London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham and Halle orchestras among others and festival appearances at Bard and Newport in the USA, Bergen, Elverum and Trondheim in Norway, Como Autumn Music in Italy, Prague Spring, The Ruhr Klavier-Festival and Schloss vor Husum in Germany, La Roque d”Antheron and Paris Chopin in France and Valdemossa Chopin in Majorca. Highlights in the 08-09 season include his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic and a recital for Wigmore Hall’s London Pianoforte Series.

Please click here for Piers' full biography.
 

Fauré was born in the shadow of the Pyrenees and showed musical talent from an early age. His education and training led him to Paris where he met Saint-Saens. They became firm life-long friends and, like a number of other French composers, became involved in music at the Church de la Madeleine. He became deputy organist to Saint-Saens and eventually choirmaster. In 1893 Fauré became Inspector of French Provincial Conservatoires and three years later returned to La Madeleine as organist. In the same year he became teacher of composition at the Paris Conservatoire where his pupils included Ravel, Enescu and Nadia Boulanger. In 1905 he was appointed Director, a post he held until 1920.

In 1919 Prince Albert I of Monaco asked Fauré to write the music for a ‘choreographic divertissement’. Fauré wrote eight movements, four of which were later made into an orchestral suite.

I  Overture (1868) – sparkling and tuneful full of energy and bustle;

II  Menuet (1918/19) – a gentle stately dance with a trio of more grandeur;

III Gavotte (1869) – a positive approach to this ancient dance, but room for graceful woodwind;

IV Pastorale (1919) – the only movement Fauré wrote expressly for the commission. The main theme from the Overture makes a number of wistful appearances part-way through the Pastorale before the gentle conclusion of this charming suite.
 

It is incredible that in 1786, while working flat out to complete The Marriage of Figaro and assorted other works, Mozart managed to write three of his greatest piano concertos, among them this one in A major. 

I Allegro – described as ‘a smiling exterior masking emotional intensity’, the opening movement is ‘grace touched with sadness’ for there are moments when darker emotions break through this generally sunny music.

II Adagio – this central movement is in the style of a ‘siciliano’, a dance with lilting, almost lazy rhythms. Here is Mozart at his most lyrical, with flutes and clarinets adding their voices to this profound music. Some of the writing for the piano may seem sparse with big empty leaps between notes but it was the practice in Mozart’s day for soloists to fill in the gaps and to embellish notes, as singers of arias were expected to do with their vocal lines. The movement is in the relative key of F# minor, a key rarely used by the composer.

III Allegro assai – after the melancholy of the middle movement, the piano leaps into life in a movement full of high spirits and sheer enjoyment.
 

Beethoven had been dead for only eight years when Saint-Saens was born and he died when the atonal ideas of Schoenberg were turning the musical world upside down.

Camille was indeed a child prodigy. He played the piano part of a Beethoven violin sonata in concert at the age of four and a half. He was only 10 and a half when he made his Paris debut playing the solo piano parts in concertos by Beethoven and Mozart and offered to play any of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from memory as an encore!

The second of his three symphonies was completed in1859 and has the usual four movements.

I Allegro marcato – Allegro appassionato – confident chords lead to the oboe and bassoon repeating the individual notes of the chord. A solo violin adds its voice to this introductory music as phrase after phrase prepare us for the main body of the movement. A brisk string fugue, based on the notes of the chord, propel the movement into life. This idea is passed around the orchestra and eventually provides the material for the dashing ending.

II Adagio – a gently lilting theme on the strings is presented at the outset. Woodwind join in to add colour to this simple but effective music.

III Scherzo presto – an infectious rhythm is a feature of this delightful short movement. A rather cheeky little trio with tricky cross rhythms slows the momentum for a while and just as a return to the opening seems on the cards, a sudden chord brings it all to an end.

IV Prestissimo – a tarantella rhythm launches the final, first on strings, then with woodwind joining in. The movement is also notable for the return of a number of themes heard previously in the movement, a typical Saint-Saens characteristic. The composer puts a stop to all this relentless momentum with a quasi-romantic episode for strings, before the momentum is restored and the music hurtles to an end.

Mahler described this fourth movement from his Fifth symphony as his love song to Alma, the woman he had met recently and whom he was to marry.

Scored for harp and strings, this richly romantic music shows how much he had been affected by her. The first two movements of the symphony are dark, lengthy funeral marches while the Adagietto shows the immense changes in his mind during the composing of this ‘giant of a work’.

Rather like Barber’s Adagio from earlier in the season, the Adagietto has become more associated with sadness and grief after being used in the film Death in Venice. Such a thing was very far from the composer’s mind as he poured out his love for Alma in this expressive Adagietto of just over 100 bars in length.

© Barry Sharkey 2008