Well, it looks like it's been over a month since my last post. Plus ça change, etc. Anyway, it's been a busy few weeks, so I thought I'd do a quick round-up.
In October I had three consecutive weeks of classical guitar fun, with the odd bit of terror in there for good measure.
On Saturday 7th the Brighton Guitar Quartet played our first full concert since the summer, at St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean. The set was a slight adaptation of the one we've played a few times this year already with a couple of new/revived numbers thrown in: Leo Brouwer's "Toccata" and Luigi Boccherini's "Introduction & Fandango". We had a really good turnout and the set seemed to go down very well. From my point of view it was the most enjoyable concert we've played yet, with the material really bedded in.
We're now working on a largely new set to roll out next year (with candidate material including work by Phillip Houghton, Vincent Lindsey-Clark, Mussorgsky, Bach and more) and already have some 2024 shows in Falmer, Blatchington and Worthing lined up. Thanks as ever to our brilliant director Gregg Isaacson for organising the show and his consummate leadership.
The following weekend I attended another of Gerald Garcia's excellent guitar ensemble weekends at Benslow Music in Hitchin, working on a whole bunch of music Gerald had sent ahead of the workshop: some of Gerald's own work, plus his arrangements of Piazzolla and Bach, and a mesmerising trio by the Croatian composer Filip Alilovic, "Spiritus Vitae". As ever, it amazed me how the pieces came together between the usual shonky opening session on the Friday night to the final concert on Sunday. What can I say? Gerald somehow makes it happen (some shouting may occur).
Along the way there was the traditional late evening, er, drunk sight-reading session and a student concert on Saturday in which I performed some Stravinsky duets with my Brighton guitar buddy Paul Dallaway (Theodore Norman's late 60s arrangement of the piano studies "Eight Pieces") and an arrangement of McCartney's "Blackbird" with the singer Alison Du Crane (I encouraged a bit of a singalong, of course.) All in all, exhausting fun. Thanks to Gerald for his energy and incredible musical insight, and to Greg Gomberg for pulling it all together. I'm already looking forward to next year.
Oh, almost forgot, one of the other players at the session, Bernhard Crede, who was making a return to Benslow after a gap of some years, shared this hand-drawn timetable from the weekend back in 1988 - a real work of art by Gerald!
And then (I said I'd been busy) it was time for last weekend's Guitars By The Sea down here in Brighton, organised once again by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon. This was GBTS's second outing and if anything was even better than last year's. The weekend comprised rehearsals in small ensembles and as an orchestra with all the players in attendance. The small group I was in worked on Steve's typically brilliant arrangement of Telemann's G Major viola concerto, while the "orchestra" looked at Akis Filio's "Eight Little Corninthians in Tub" and Luc Lévesque's quite mad montage of tunes from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker".
The weekend featured a lot of great direction from Jon and Steve, of course, but it was particularly thrilling to be steered through Steve's arrangement of the Telemann by Chris Stell. Chris is a fantastic guitarist in his own right, but has pretty much dedicated his life to ensemble playing, most notably with Mark Eden in the Eden Stell Guitar Duo. It showed; I have rarely been exposed to such insight about classical guitar ensemble playing.
The weekend culminated in a final get-together at Essex Hall in Brighton. The session opened with great presentations by the renowned guitarist Paul Gregory and luthier Stephen Eden, followed by some individual performances ahead of the final small ensemble and orchestra performances. I was honoured to play with the aforementioned Paul D and Shaun Bullard in a trio playing another of Akis Filios' pieces, "Dry River" - it's a blast to play with such lovely players. And I was relieved to somewhat redeem myself after my car crash in last year's final GBTS concert, making it through the solo part of the Telemann opening movement with at least 90% of the right notes in 90% of the right places. That said, it was the largo movement, so anything else would have been a disgrace, but still...
Anyway, another great weekend. Many thanks to the apparently indefatigable Jon for making it happen, and so seamlessly! Check out the GBTS Facebook page for updates.
In other news, I'm continuing my harmony and theory studies with the composer Peter Copley. As I reported recently, I've slightly stepped back from the Bach chorale work in order to work through Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" species counterpoint exercises (oh, the joy of it!) but I'm still doing the odd one. Here's my re-harmonisation of the chorale "O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort":
And then, as a gig-goer, it's been quite a few weeks. First up, of course, I have to highlight my son Frank Hopkins' first headline show in London, at the Pickle Factory in Hackney. Frank's done a lot of support gigs over the last year or so but this was immense: a 70-minute set of music that ran from spatial, ambient electronica to genuinely jump-up-and-down dance numbers.
Anyway, I can't really describe it. To get an idea of what Frank does, check out his most recent album, Aeturnum:
In non-family-related gig news... I saw Brad Mehldau turn in a solo recital at the Wigmore Hall (in the company of my long-term musical collaborator Steve Morgan and his brother Paul), and it was, honestly, among the finest concerts I've ever attended. I think the sheer number of encores (four? five?) said it all. Sebastian Scotney captured it well on London Jazz News. When Mehdldau turned to Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" I felt close to passing out. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Mehldau's autobiography over Christmas.
I also popped down to Bristol to see the Swedish post-metallers Cult of Luna with my bezzie Kate Norton. A night out in Bristol with Kate was always going to be great fun - and it was - and the gig was phenomenal. I'm not entirely sure why CoL haven't achieved stadium status, given how epic they are. But maybe I am. Here's their most recent album:
Finally, Sarah and I went to a fantastic Sunday afternoon concert given by the Brighton Philharmonic, the first in their 2023-24 season. Joanna MacGregor's role as musical director seems to be having quite an impact; conducted by Clark Rundell, this was a show exclusively of 20th Centrury American work (Gershwin, Bernstein, Ives and Adams) and a total blast from beginning to end. MacGregor's perfromance of the Gershwin piano concerto was utterly exhilarating. The rest of the season's programme is equally exciting - please get along and support their new direction.
On a lower note, I was genuinely saddened to hear of the death of the great jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley. With such a storied and brilliant career, it's invidious to point to any of her work in her particular, but what the hell. Here's her mercurial, genre-defying, and, truth be told, entirely bonkers 1971 masterpiece Escalator over the Hill, featuring contributions from, among others, Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Charlie Haden, Gato Barbieri and Linda Rondstadt (I did say "bonkers"):
From the archive Here's a reminder of my score video for the guitar quartet I wrote as part of the composition module on my Master's back in December 2021. The BGQ has been playing the middle movement, "The Age of the One Moon", as a standalone piece in recent concerts. Hopefully we'll get to roll the whole thing out at some point - although that last movement does look tricky!
Finally, a snapshot of my listening in 2023 to date. Happy shuffling!
Enjoyed that very much Simon. And very glad to have shared at least one of those weekends with you.
Posted by: Peter Lovett | November 04, 2023 at 12:07 PM