A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be part of a filming project at the Wigmore Hall. I hadn’t been to any live music (indoor or outdoor) for months, let alone inside a concert venue. We arrived at the front door as agreed, masks on. The door
Christopher Glynn is a highly successful pianist – a song accompanist and chamber musician – as well as being the artistic director of the Ryedale Festival in North Yorkshire, which usually runs for two weeks in July. Since the festival couldn’t go ahead as normal, RyeStream was created to share a series of performances filmed
One of my favourite stories to tell students of nineteenth-century music history concerns Edward Elgar’s trips to hear new orchestral repertoire. As you may know, Elgar grew up in Worcestershire, where there was no permanent orchestra. The best place to go to hear new orchestral pieces was just to the
In the third and final of my City Lit ‘taster’ sessions this week, one of my students regarded me with raised eyebrows after some point I’d made about Lieder. ‘You’re one of those tutors who tells jokes, aren’t you?’ she declared. ‘Good.’ As you might expect, I get quite a
Last Friday morning, I stood in the beautiful parish church of Birdsall, in North Yorkshire, and said good morning to the eager crowd gathered before me. I pointed down at the navy blue waistcoat I was wearing, and took a moment to offer the service announcement that I had, in
The temperatures are still high, the Orange Menace will soon be leaving the UK, and I’ve spent the last couple of days shuttling between Yorkshire, where I’m giving talks and leading interviews over the course of the wonderful Ryedale Festival, and London, where I was speaking on Record Review yesterday
Last week saw my annual visit to the beautiful Howardian Hills in Yorkshire, for the glorious Ryedale Festival. This is the third year in a row that I’ve had the privilege of speaking at Ryedale, and for the first time this year I was not there primarily to work with
Now that July has arrived, I’m about to have to start knuckling down to work again – to preparation for talks and notes for a whole host of wonderful things, including the Ryedale Festival, the Oxford Lieder Festival, the North Norfolk Music Festival and some forthcoming summer courses at City
Today, I’m off to the Wigmore Hall to hear a new English-language translation, by Jeremy Sams, of Schubert’s Winterreise, performed by Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn. I was fortunate enough to hear this at the Ryedale Festival in July, and can’t wait to listen again – it’s an astonishing piece
It’s that time of year again, and I’m back in the stunning surroundings of north Yorkshire for the 2016 Ryedale Festival. Better still, I’ve been working again with the wonderful Heath Quartet in four concerts, presenting the entire late Beethoven quartets in tandem with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, read with
