Percy French News
Irish composer and artist (1854-1920)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Percy French)
- Republic of Ireland
- engineer, painter, composer, songwriter
Last update
2024-03-22
Refresh
2024-03-20 10:11:00
Soundscapes, an immersive audio-visual installation that invites audiences on a sensory journey through the Yorkshire Dales
Ben Crick & Michaela French: Soundscapes - Skipton Town Hall (Photo: Jonny Walton)Soundscapes, an immersive audio-visual installation that invites audiences on a sensory journey through the Yorkshire Dales, is now open to the public at Skipton Town Hall until 1 June 2024. The brainchild of Yorkshire’s composer and conductor of Skipton Camerata, Ben Crick, the installation was created by Crick and media artist Michaela French. Projected inside a purpose-built hemispherical dome, Soundscapes combines 360° videography of the Yorkshire Dales with a symphonic soundtrack, inspired by the landscape.Audiences sit, or lie, under the cinematic dome to undertake an extraordinary experience of sight, sound, and space, with the original orchestral composition performed by Skipton Camerata, North Yorkshire's only professional orchestra. A dynamic team of creatives from across the north has collaborated to design the installation. Ben Crick & Michaela French: Soundscapes - Skipton Town Hall (Photo: Jonny Walton)Full details from Skipton Town Hall's website.Ben Crick & Michaela French: Soundscapes - […]
2024-03-18 03:30:00
Ravel Orchestral Works (CD Review)
[…] CD versions of the Minnesota Ravel recordings, which Vox released in remarkably cheap cardboard packaging. It is heartening to see the care that Naxos is taking with this new series. The one curious decision by the Naxos production team as far as I can see concerns the order of the program; specifically, the decision to close rather than open with the brief (1:55) fanfare from the children’s ballet L’Éventail de Jeanne (“Jean’s Fan”), which premiered in 1929. Ten French composers contributed the music the, including the fanfare by Ravel. Although it is not the fanfare for any of the other compositions included on this disc, it still seems much more fitting for a fanfare to open rather than close a program, n’cest-pas? Other than that, there is nothing about this jam-packed (80+ minutes) release about which to quibble. In our previous Classical Candor posting (Recent Releases No. 72, here), we mentioned another fine Skrowaczewski-led Minnesota performance. […]
2024-03-16 09:57:00
From Early Music to contemporary: the Royal Festival Hall organ is 70 and organist James McVinnie is celebrating with a Southbank Centre residency
[…] destroyed by bombing in 1941. It was a philosophical statement, that the arts were important and this is a statement that is still appropriate today with the funding crises that the arts are facing. So the hall and the organ are both a great enterprise and an ideal for us today.The result is an organ that James sees as ideal for music from the 16th and 17th centuries, anything that has counterpoint including Bach and French classical. James' recital on the afternoon of 23 March 2024 has a programme of the type of music that Downes would have had in his ears, Sermisy, Praetorius, Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Böhm, Buxtehude and Bach [see Southbank Centre website]. But in his second recital on the evening of 23 March, James is exploring the other end of the repertoire with a performance of Infinity Gradient, the 2021 tour-de-force for organ and 100 speakers by American […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-03-14 15:45:32
A Long Road of Remembrance and Hope
[…] around the world into an oratorio to create a Lied of the scattered Sinti and Roma. “The Long Road” is a road of longing, of yearning, a path that leads to and from remembrance; each step and footprint on this road, imbued with a profound sense of Fernweh, embraces hope and beauty through resilience and consolation. O Lungo Drom sets the words of thirteen different poets from this minority in ten languages – including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Macedonian, Serbian, Polish and three Romanes dialects. The 66-minute piece is in one continuous movement, organized in a tripartite narrative: Ascent - II. Nadir - III. Vista. Are these sectional titles chronological? Yes, to some extent. A significant portion of Ascent traces the background history of the Roma, their journey from India into Europe, through the evocative poetry of Lekša Mānuš, a Latvian Rom. This origin story also functions as […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): F...