The LMP have been asked to play for a charity event for Kristina Rihanoff – professional dancer from the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. The event will be at the Mansion House and those in attendance will include the Prime Minister.
Kristina was the ‘Strictly’ professional partner of John Sergeant (2008), Jason Donovan (2011), and James Bond actors Goldie (2010) and Colin Salmon (2012).
The photo is of the cake that Julia Desbruslais made and beautifully decorated with the new LMP logo.
You can help underwrite a concert for just £1,000.
Supporting the London Mozart Players
The LMP would be delighted to hear from you should you or anyone you know be interested in participating in or supporting the orchestra’s future work programme and activities, sponsoring concerts, education and community projects or becoming a Friend of the LMP.
LMP Benefactors
From world-class concerts to inspirational education projects, none of the LMP’s work would be possible without the financial support we receive from our Benefactors and Conductors’ Circle. These are our musical patrons, following in the footsteps of those generous, passionate and committed philanthropists who, throughout the centuries, have enabled great musicians to perform and compose. They are kept closely involved with the orchestra and its activities and their support is acknowledged in our concert programmes.
For an annual donation of £1,000 or more you can become a Benefactor of the LMP and enjoy a unique programme of events, including access to rehearsals, exclusive recitals, gala concerts and special receptions throughout the year. The LMP’s most generous Benefactors become members of the Conductors’ Circle and are closely involved with the musicians and management team and play a significant role in the life of the LMP.
Sponsor a Chair
You could also Sponsor a Chair from as little as £50 per month and enjoy a special connection with the orchestra and your chosen player:
By supporting an LMP chair – be it our Principal Horn or a member of the second violin section – your donation will helping the orchestra, directly enabling the LMP to perform fantastic concerts and carry out inspirational work in schools and in the community.
You can support an LMP chair with a single donation or you can choose to donate monthly by standing order. Whichever chair you sponsor, your donation will support a crucial part of the orchestra and will give you a unique insight into the life of the LMP.
Become a Friend of LMP
The LMP has very active and supportive Friends. The Friends organise various activities such as monthly Coffee Meetings, a private Friends’ Bar at Fairfield Concert, various outings to LMP concerts around the country and an annual Friends’ Concert and Lunch. Friends receive a quarterly newsletter and at Fairfield concerts there is the opportunity to meet LMP players, conductors and soloists in the Friends’ Bar.
Without the support from the Friends, the LMP would be unable to continue to present concerts and develop its award-winning Education and Community Programme. Your donation will assist the orchestra to achieve the highest levels of artistic excellence and help us to maintain our position as one of the premier chamber orchestras.
In return for an annual fee, which goes towards the above activities, members of the LMP Friends are given many benefits in addition to the knowledge that their money is supporting the wonderful work the LMP does in concert halls, schools, rural communities and residential homes around the UK.
The annual subscription for a Friend is £40 for single membership and £60 for couple membership. Renewals take place in September, we offer a pro-rata subscription. We are very grateful to the Friends for their continuous support.
For more information on how you may become more involved with the LMP please contact Peter Wright at ([email protected]), Nick Mallett ([email protected]) or Jenny Brady ([email protected]) or Tel: 020 8686 1996.
Or visit our website at www.lmp.org
Alternatively, please fill in this form before and post it to us at the address below.
This week the London Mozart Players will prove that they really are the comeback kids of the orchestral world. Twice in recent years this fine chamber orchestra has threatened to disappear. The first time was in 2011, when it lost its Arts Council grant. The second was earlier this year, when Croydon Council pulled the plug on its very generous annual grant, after 24 years of support.
But it’s still with us, and on May 28 the LMP will be giving a concert with star guest soloist Angela Hewitt in St John’s Smith Square, repeated the following day at Fairfield Halls in Croydon.
The LMP has managed to pull back from the brink by practising what in America comes as second nature: self-help, and calling on a little help from friends. The orchestra has become a self-governing entity, with the players themselves acting as the orchestra’s agent, manager and PR. A few months back Vernon Ellis, chairman of the British Council and patron of English National Opera, hosted a fund-raising concert for the orchestra at his house. That and some energetic proselytising by the players has raised just under £100,000. A number of eminent musicians associated with the orchestra have given their services for free, including pianist Howard Shelley, conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, violinist Tasmin Little, and the winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012, cellist Laura van der Heijden. These two concerts this week are a way of saying we’re still here and we mean business.
I’m glad they’re still here, because for me and many other classical music lovers the LMP is part of this country’s musical furniture. The orchestra was founded in 1949, which makes it the oldest chamber orchestra in Britain, and was led right up to the early 1980s by its founder Harry Blech. I saw him as a student in the latter part of his reign, and remember thinking he seemed as old as the hills. He strode stiffly up to the podium and conducted with a no-nonsense sturdy technique, as if he was kneading dough.
Since then Jane Glover, Matthias Bamert and Andrew Parrott have all taken on the role of MD. I remember the Bamert years especially well, as the orchestra’s programming was particularly lively, with a steady flow of commissioned works. Since 2010 the gifted South African-born conductor Gerard Korsten, whom the players clearly warm to, has taken the lead.
So what next? There are several steps the Players are taking to survive in the medium term, such as reviving their connection with Croydon’s Fairfield Halls. This has the best acoustics in Greater London, and the orchestra has a history of residency there stretching back 24 years. The orchestra also has a long-standing relationship with Portsmouth Grammar School, which has involved commissiong a string of new works, and also burgeoned outwards into the local community. There are plans to transplant the fruits of this back into the orchestra’s original Croydon base.
This combination of artistic enterprise with grass-roots involvement gives a model of how the orchestra might prosper in the long term. Bringing this off won’t be easy. Like the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the LMP has had some of its shine taken off by the rise of “period” bands such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. At the other end of the historical spectrum are those groups which have pulled the chamber orchestra into the modern era, such as the Britten Sinfonia and the Scottish Ensemble.
The signs are that the LMP is learning a few tricks from these upstarts. There are plans to build relationships with starry musicians to act as soloists and directors for particular projects, as the Britten Sinfonia does so cleverly. There’s also a sense among these younger orchestras that rooting what they do in a particular place and time is the key to success, as much as artistic quality. For example, rather than just commissioning a composer to write a piece, you link it to something specific about the moment. The LMP has tried this already with its Portsmouth commissions, where each year the new piece has been linked to the theme of Remembrance Day (a particularly emotive topic in a naval city).
This shows the LMP is serious about reinventing itself. On the other hand, there is the accumulated loyalty and affection, among both audiences and musicians, for what the LMP has always been. And of course there’s the inherited treasure of the orchestra’s core repertoire. Mozart and Haydn’s symphonies and concertos will always be great music, and there will always be an appetite for them.
The difficulty is that these different aspects of the orchestra’s identity pull in different directions. The trick over the coming months and years will be to manage that tension, so that past and present knit together in a way that makes sense. It’s a more than worthy enterprise, and we should wish them well with it.
LMP START Project: Carnival of the Endangered Animals let loose in Croydon!
Over 500 young people across the London borough of Croydon presented a brand new work developed Read more
Dear Friends and supporters,
One of the new collaborations we are working on may include booking new upcoming young artists. One or more of the pianists playing in this concert could be invited to play with us. You can go and get a “preview”. We have been offered an exclusive deal on this concert. If you buy a £20 ticket then the LMP will receive £10 of the ticket price as a donation.
The number of tickets available is limited so if your are interested then please respond as soon as possible.
Please contact Peter Wright as soon as possible if you are interested.
From a Percussionist point of view. – Surrey Hills Festival – Rodion Shchedrin, Bizet Carmen Suite
Preparation.
This will be a very long day! This is a large and complex piece to organise logistically and the percussion parts have been emailed to the percussion players in advance. Each of the five players have their own individual part with a long list of instruments they will have to play. The setup for each player is important – how to position the instruments around themselves to be able move from instrument to instrument in the most intuitive way to play everything that’s been written for them. A percussion stage plan has been drawn which will undoubtedly change on arrival at the venue!
Between Sarah Stuart and myself we have worked out who is to bring which of the 45 or so separate percussion instruments for this work including 5 timpani, Marimba, Vibraphone, 2 pairs of bongos, tubular bells, 5 tuned tom toms, 3 tuned cow bells, Xylophone and copious toys and stands to put everything on. The percussion equipment completely fills two vans.
In the morning the vans take an hour to load. We arrive at the venue over two hours before the rehearsal. This is the minimum amount of time we will need to unload, build all the instruments and work out how to position all the instruments on the stage. As we work we realise the 5 timpani will have to go behind the double basses on the lower stage and the percussion will have to be staggered as there is not the room for all the percussionists to be in a line on the higher staging.
With just enough time for fine tuning some of the drums we are ready to play at 2pm.
The rehearsal.
With the curtains soaking up much of the sound the percussion players are finding they are having to play up more than usual. Shchedrin creates subtle textures with the Marimba and Vibraphone and even writes chords on the tubular bells using two players and these are important colours not to be lost. The piece also really shows off the versatility and virtuosity of the LMP strings.
The Concert.
The first half is Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat major and Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra. These pieces demonstrate superbly the LMP’s deftness and lightness of touch, technical skill and world renound chamber skills in accompanying and supporting the soloists and giving them a perfect canvas and the right atmosphere to shine. The second half is the Shchedrin Carmen Suite and is the perfect piece to showcase the LMP at their electric and exciting best. After returning to the stage 5 times during the final applause, Daniel Cohen and Guest Leader Ruth Rogers lead the orchestra from the stage and leave the audience wanting more.
Roughly two and a quarter hours after the end of the concert at 00.10 Sarah and I leave; tired but extremely happy at the end of another fantastic day of music making with the London Mozart Players.
Written by Scott Bywater, Principal Percussion and Co-Principal Timpani of the LMP.
Many thanks go to Sarah Stuart for her help, organisational skills and splendid playing as guest Principal Percussion on this concert.
LMP Gala Concert
A hundred or so people were privileged to attend the most delightful gala concert on Tuesday 29 May. The concert was genially hosted by Sir Vernon Ellis. Sir Vernon is an eminent businessman, chair of the British Council, and famous for his enduring support to music, especially opera, as recognised by his knighthood. The venue was one of the many stars of the evening; as out host explained, the venue was once a hotel, so the size of the reception area and its resemblance to the salons in which the music of Mozart and many others was originally performed was entirely explicable and appropriate. Such is Sir Vernon’s love of music that he considers himself self-indulgent rather than generous to host as many as 90 concerts each year.
On what was an unusually warm evening, many guests arrived having survived the inconvenience of the tube strike, to be welcomed in a way which made the cares of the day swiftly dissolve. The LMP indulged their guests in a multi-faceted feast from start to finish. Even before the main course of music, the guests enjoyed a champagne reception, with canapés and other hors d’oeuvres most of which were prepared by the multi-talented Julia Desbruslais, served generously and charmingly by members of the orchestra and at least one of their offspring. The reception provided an ample opportunity for mingling with friends old and new.
The concert was wonderful in so many ways. The programme was beautifully constructed and performed. Our ears adjusted to the rather intimate acoustic of this venue to the sound of the Magic Flute overture, conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton. Then we had another glimpse of the prodigious talent of Laura van der Heijden (BBC Young Musician of the Year 2012) performing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations with such apparent ease and finesse as if she’d been doing so far longer than her 17 years. Tasmin Little followed, backed by the string section, in “Winter” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Such was the intimacy of the occasion that Tasmin took the time before playing to introduce the composer’s markings to the score, which gave some of us, at least, a new perspective on a familiar piece.
Howard Shelley has a great knack of putting the great music he plays into context, as those who manage to attend the pre-concert talks/interviews that are such a feature of LMP concerts well know. He led the orchestra through two movements of Mozart’s sublime concerto no 21, having explained how this was written in an extraordinarily productive period.
Those who assembled this programme might well have asked themselves “How do you follow that?” With a nod to Monty Python, perhaps they said “and now for something not completely different”. Somebody of undoubted genius (£10, please, Peter) but too young to have heard them live (that’s £20, please) claimed to recall the work of the incomparable Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, and in particular their song to the tune of Mozart’s horn concerto. With great ingenuity (£30) he approached a trumpet student and successful author, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and commissioned her to produce an updated version, around the theme of the LMP’s parlous financial circumstances. Such was his persuasiveness (£40), that Cynthia accepted the commission and delivered a masterpiece.
With Messrs Flanders and Swann sadly no longer available, there was simply no choice but to plead, cajole or blackmail Sir Richard Stilgoe to perform the world premiere of this hilarious and linguistically demanding work. Whatever the measures taken to arrange his cooperation, they worked and the outcome was a masterwork, both in conception and delivery.
Viv Davies, the managing director of the “new” LMP took the opportunity to thank all concerned for their generous contributions to the evening, including Sir Vernon and Lady Ellis, the performers (all of whom had waived their fee) and the audience. Viv played particular tribute quite rightly to the members of the working group of musicians who are working tirelessly and almost sleeplessly on the various activities necessary to secure and enhance the future of the LMP. Representing that group, Paul Archibald, Julia Desbruslais and Peter Wright then introduced the main themes of these projects
As if that wasn’t enough, we were all further indulged with a delicious buffet supper, again served by the indefatigable LMP players, but who then had more time to mingle. It was a real privilege to be able to chat freely with the performers, and the evening came to an end all too soon.
Article by Nick Mallett
Listening to Mozart minuets could speed up your reaction times when working, according to a new study. Researchers from Kyoto and Harvard Universities found people of a range of ages worked more efficiently while listening to the soothing strains of a Mozart minuet.
Participants aged between eight and nine and 65 to 75 were asked to complete a Stroop task, where a word spelling out a colour is presented in a different colour (such as ‘red’ written in blue letters). When listening to Mozart quietly in the background, reaction times were faster and error rates were lower than when listening to no music at all, or listening to a modified version of the piece with introduced errors.
These findings help make the case that music, sometimes thought of as a pleasant byproduct of evolution, may have played an positive role in human evolution, regardless of cultural systems of harmony or pitch. It’s also further evidence of the Mozart effect, which suggests listening to classical music can make you more intelligent.
Click here for the complete article
The LMP performed at this wonderful hall on Friday 25th April 2014. We would like to thank everyone involved at the hall for inviting us to perform. Thanks also to Orchestras Live for their support with this event.
Howard Shelley was conductor and soloist and gave a great performance – as usual. The program included Poulenc Sinfonietta and Aubade (for Piano and 18 instruments). The concert concluded with Haydn Symphony 104 “London”.
Thank you to Sebastian Comberti and Howard for the pre concert talk. Members of the orchestra met the audience during the interval.
The staff at the hall were so friendly and helpful. They also provided yummy snacks and fruit with Tea during our breaks and made the orchestra feel extremely welcome.
We are really looking forward to re visiting in the future.
Louise Honeyman died on March 19th 2014. Louise was the Managing Director of the LMP during the 80’s and 90’s. She was the first Woman MD of a British Orchestra. Jane Glover was appointed, by Louise, as Artistic Director. In March 1989 she approached Croydon Council and they agreed to make the LMP their resident orchestra. Louise was also responsible for bringing in HRH Prince Edward as the Patron.
Louise was a much loved character and the LMP was her passion right through her retirement. She suffered a severe Stroke on March 15th 2014. Her partner was David Wilson who has been the General Manager of the orchestra since the 80’s. David bravely attended our concert on March 20th accompanied by Louise’s family.
We will all miss Louise tremendously. The concert on March 20th was dedicated to her memory. Our thoughts are with David and Louise’s family.
PRESS RELEASE: 12 February 2014
“A renaissance for the London Mozart Players!”
‘’……….it gives me more joy than I can say to perform and record with them, I am honoured to be their Conductor Laureate” (Howard Shelley)
The London Mozart Players, the UK’s longest established chamber orchestra and considered by many as one of Europe’s finest, is to become self-governing in a bold but characteristically creative move to counter recent funding cuts.
As of May 2014, when the LMP’s current principal conductor, Gérard Korsten, rests the baton at the final concert in their 2013/14 Fairfield Halls series, a core group of orchestral members led by Viv Davies, a former classical musician turned economist with 20 years senior management experience in the non-profit sector, will take up collective responsibility for the management and strategic direction of the orchestra, drawing upon a wealth of professional experience from within the ranks of the LMP.
Current members of the management team include Paul Archibald (Projects), Julia Desbruslais (Education) and Peter Wright (Operations). David Wilson (General Manager), Jenny Brady (Concerts Coordinator) and Martin Sargeson (Orchestral Librarian) will continue to provide crucial administrative, management and logistical support.
In support of the management team will be an impressive and experienced group of player ambassadors, led by Marieke Blankestijn, that will advise on the artistic direction of the LMP.
The LMP’s niche lies in interpretive research and understanding of performance style, but with the advantages of instruments designed for the modern concert hall and audience. Its mission is to perform classical music to the highest standards of excellence and to take music to communities where access to live concerts is limited. The orchestra is also committed to devising workshops for schools and hospitals, creating projects that bring people together and enrich lives through a shared musical experience. New plans and initiatives are now underway as the LMP is set to build exciting new partnerships within these communities.
There is unanimous commitment to ensuring the LMP will continue to occupy an exciting and dynamic position in the musical life of the UK and on the international stage. One of the LMP’s first engagements as a rejuvenated organisation will be a tour of China in May. In the meantime, a gala fundraising concert featuring Howard Shelley, Tasmin Little and Laura Van der Heijden will take place on 29 April in Kensington. Discussions are also underway with sponsors for concerts through 2014/15, and for a range of community-based projects in the south-east and around the UK.
“This orchestra is one of the jewels in the crown of British music.”(Hilary Davan Wetton)
For further information on the LMP and its activities please contact:
Paul Archibald: 07973 731866, [email protected]
Peter Wright: 07831 157618, [email protected]
ENDS
We are delighted that Sir Richard has agreed to perform at our Gala fundraising concert on April 29th. You’ll have to come along to find out exactly how he will entertain you. But a re wording of a Flanders and Swan Classic is a clue!
The orchestra is due to fly to China on May 19th to perform 4 concerts with their Principal conductor Gerard Korsten. Cities include Beijing and Shanghai.
The loyal friends of the LMP made donations to help make this new website possible. Also the individual players of the orchestra each contributed £60 each. A big thank you everyone.
Snapped by David Wilson, our General Manager, at a concert in the district of South Holland. Read more
The London Mozart Players are delighted to welcome back acclaimed pianist and director Howard Shelley for the first of three programmes this season. Read more
The LMP will return to ‘St John’s Smith Square’ in 2014 with concerts from Howard Shelley, Angela Hewitt and Gerard Korsten. Read more