Hellens 2012 EVENTS

Saturday 25th February – Rosamunde Trio Concert

7:00 for 7:30 p.m. in the Great Barn

Martino Tirimo (piano) 

Ben Sayevich (violin)                         

Daniel Veis (cello)

We are proud to welcome the Rosamunde Trio who have been rapturously received on their UK tours.  The Trio's pianist and founder, Martino Tirimo, is a pianist of world renown, who appears regularly in major recitals and with the world’s top orchestras.  The violinist Ben Sayevich and cellist Daniel Veis are also international soloists. Following the Rosamunde’s recent success at London’s Kings Place, the Trio has been invited to do a major series there in 2013 devoted to the complete Piano Trios of Beethoven. The Trio have toured extensively in Britain and have played at major venues in the USA, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Cyprus and the Czech Republic. 

“The members of the Rosamunde Trio are world-class soloists in their own right…The brilliance and clarity with which Tirimo played the virtuosic runs was breathtaking.”  **** The Independent

“a thing to cherish… one of the finest around. The most perfect of performances."    Music & Vision

Programme:

 MOZART   Trio in G K496

BRAHMS   Trio in C minor Op.101

DVORAK  'Dumky' Trio

Tickets £15 (including a glass of wine during the interval), available from Hellens: 01531 660504 or info@hellensmanor.com

http://www.rosamundetrio.com

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Sunday 22nd January, Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival

1pm and 4pm in the Great Barn

Hungarian Dances

12.15 Pre-concert talk by Stephen Walsh on Bartók’s first String Quartet

1.00 Lunchtime Concert (lunch available to buy afterwards)

Dohnányi           Piano Quintet No.2 in E flat minor, op.26
Bartók                 String Quartet no.1

3.15pm Pre-concert talk by Richard Wigmore on the afternoon’s music

4.00 Teatime Concert

Work performed by the resident string quartet
Mendelssohn    String Quartet in D, op. 44 no 1
Liszt                      Vallée d’Obermann and Orphee (for Piano Trio)
Haydn                  Piano Trio No.35 in C major, Hob XV: 21
Brahms                String Quintet in F, op.88

The Artists:

Baritone:  Ivan Ludlow
Piano:  Simon Crawford-Phillips, Tim Horton, Daniel Tong
Violin: Sara Bitlloch, Malin Broman, Arisa Fujita, Donald Grant, Tom Hankey, Amyn Merchant, Matthew Truscott
Viola:  Tom Dunn, Martin Saving, Malin William-Olsson
Cello:  Marie Bitlloch, Robin Michael, Alice Neary, Adrian Brendel

The Kreisler Quartet
Violin:  Florence Cooke, Julia Loucks
Viola:  Drew Balch
Cello:  Jonathan Rees

Tickets:

All tickets include a pre-concert talk. Please use the Contact Us page to book your place. Hellens Day Ticket £22 / Lunchtime Concert £12.

To book tickets please visit http://wyevalleyfestival.com

Do consider supporting Wye Valley Chamber Music by becoming a Friend. As a Friend you receive advance notice, and priority booking including a small discount at all our events (which often sell out), and an invitation to the lovely Friends’ Party which rounds off the Festival at Hellens Manor each year. Please contact us for more information.

www.wyevalleyfestival.com

 

Hellens 2011 EVENTSSunday 4th December - Ledbury Poetry Festival

Shakespeare with Roger Lloyd Pack and Hannah Watkins

4pm in the Great Barn. £15

The Ledbury Poetry Festival is holding a fundraising event at Hellens Manor on Sunday 4th December at 4pm. Roger Lloyd Pack best known as Trigger in Only Fools and Horses and currently to be seen on TV in The Borgias, and actress Hannah Watkins who has appeared on stage for the RSC and both film and TV, will be performing extracts from Shakespeare’s plays at Hellens Manor in the Barn. After the event there will be mulled wine, mince pies and a raffle.

Tickets are £15 (no concessions) Tel: 0845 458 1743 manager@poetry-festival.com. Friends of Ledbury Poetry Festival have a two day priority booking period 31st October and 1st November – general booking opens on the 2nd November from 10am – 4pm Monday – Thursday. Outside of these hours please call Jo Kingham on 01531 632230.

To become a Friend of Ledbury Poetry Festival email manager@poetry-festival.com for further details.

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Saturday & Sunday 8th & 9th of October – The Big Apple

12 noon to 4.45pm. Entry £2.00* (children free)

House tours at 1,2,3.30pm (£6, £4.50 concessions)

The Big Apple is a relatively recent institution dating back some twenty years, celebrating the long tradition of the apple harvest in Herefordshire. Held in October every year, various events are organised around Much Marcle including the Feast of Apples here at Hellens, where folks can bring along apples from their own trees to have the variety identified (a bit like Antiques Roadshow for orchard enthusiasts) or taste and buy them from a wide variety on offer. Help us make our own perry (see Activities section below); sample cider and perry from local producers and enjoy and tea and cake from our tearoom.

Activities include:

A Feast of Apples – displays of apples, cider fruit and perry pears; tastings of dessert and culinary fruit;

Apple identification by Marcher Apple Network (£2 a variety on the day where possible; otherwise collected and retained for investigation);

Sales of apple juice, cider, tools.

Apple market selling less usual varieties.

Traditional pressing of perry pears.

Various talks and special events:

Saturday 8th:

Leominster Morris, 3pm.

Mistletoe: conservation, management and a new survey. A talk by Jonathan Briggs of Mistletoe Matters. Haywain, Hellens*, 12.30pm

Single variety tasting. An expert introduction to a selection of apples, their juice and their qualities as single variety ciders. With Gabe Cook and Jean Nowell in the Haywain, Hellens*, £1.50. 2pm

Craft Cidermaking – Beyond the Basics. A talk by Andrew Lea, cidermaking guru and author. Haywain, Hellens*, 3.30pm

Sunday 9th:

'..And Slices of Quince' – a cookery demonstration by Fran Robinson, using this deceptive, fragrant orchard fruit. Haywain, Hellens*, 1.30pm

The Mystery and History of the Perry Pear – a talk by Jim Chapman, Hartpury National Collection of Perry Pears. Donations to Hartpury Trust. Haywain, Hellens*, 3pm

*Please note that unless otherwise stated an entry charge of £2 will cover all events at Hellens

Please visit the Big Apple website for more information on other local events:  http://www.bigapple.org.uk/autumntime/2011.html

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Review of Christian Blackshaw's Piano Recital on

24th September 2011

“By their teachers shall ye know them.”

If someone didn’t actually say that, they should have.  Think of Schnabel and Leschetizki, of Rubinstein and Karl Barth, of Richter and Neuhaus (himself a pupil of Godowski);  think of Christian Blackshaw and Gordon Green.

Professor Gordon Green was a very special teacher; and it shows: (think too of a pianist currently very much in the ascendant, Stephen Hough, in whom one hears many of the musical qualities also evident in Christian Blackshaw.  A co-incidence? Nothing to do with their teacher?  One would have to ask them).

This writer was lucky enough to hear a whole week of Green’s masterclasses at Dartington in 1979,   very shortly before he died; and he emphasised the importance of the pedals, instancing Cortot as a supreme master.   Feet and ears - Green rated them of supreme importance for the pianist.

And he told us of an obituary he chanced to read in a provincial paper when, just out of student days, he was travelling in France.  It concerned the death of a pianist who had spent a lifetime “exploring the thousand and one gradations between pianissimo and silence”.  Green said that that one sentence had the greatest impact on his own playing of anything he had ever read.

So on Saturday night, at Hellens Manor, we heard a master pianist who had in those not quite distant days been a pupil of a master teacher;  and Christian Blackshaw is now establishing himself as one of our finest musicians.  How fortunate that Hellens have scooped him twice this year.  Next year his audience will be at the Berlin Philharmonic.

For one instantly recognised a pianist who had learned to listen to the music he was making – not just to the notes, their dynamics and their phrasing, but the ambience that surrounds them, the subtleties of the pedalling, the very silences out of which all music emerges and without which the sounds are ultimately meaningless.

And it is these elements, not provided for on the music’s page, that challenge, defy, and sometimes defeat the performer.  Every piano is different, however reassuring the name of Steinway on the case.  Tuning and setting it up is an art, not a science.  How does it respond to the player’s touch? What does it sound like to him as he sits on his stool?   What does it sound like to the audience on their ranks of chairs?  What actually reaches their subjective ears? What difference does their very presence make to the acoustic?  How do the reflections and absorptions of wood and flesh affect what the pianist hopes he is doing with ivory and felt and leather and tensioned steel?  He must have his doubts and worries.  And then there’s Mozart and Liszt and Schubert to put into the mix.  Does anyone actually do this job from choice?

But on the night none of that mattered.

With the first sonata we knew we were in safe hands, hands with the right priority –

the music.  Mozart’s sonatas are always intimately-scaled creations, whether written for his pupils or for personal exploration.  And in C Minor his introspection is profound. (The only other piano sonata in a minor key, the A Minor, he wrote after the death of his mother).  So we are eavesdropping on his most personal thoughts and emotions, not easily shared on a Steinway D capable of confronting the Berlin Philharmonic. 

Christian Blackshaw quickly showed he had adjusted both to the piano and its setting.  The composer’s thoughts were laid out before us, at once ordered and spontaneous. 

And the colours of the sounds – what liquor has this pianist got in his arteries? Blood, yes, for the courage and self-belief to tackle the high peaks, but also his veins flow with a veritable palette of rich and delicate colours: and with ear and foot and finger,

he lays them so precisely onto washes of translucent water colour that never blur except when he wants them to.

In Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann and Brahms’ Klavierstücke Op.119, the demands of the music – and of technique – were more obviously different, and were just as adequately fulfilled.  But after the interval – and it cannot surely have been the work of a glass of ‘free’ wine included in the already modest-enough ticket price? – came the Schubert, his last sonata.  Forget the miracle of how Schubert actually wrote so many blazing masterpieces in the final year of a tragically short life.  There is no one way of playing D960.  Not even by the same pianist. 

There may be controversy about the tempo of the first movement (How ‘molto’ is ‘molto moderato’?); and arguments about whether its exposition should be repeated or not. 

But on this occasion thoughts of this interpretation or that were irrelevant.  One was conscious of nothing but the presence of Schubert, and the audience were so caught up in the experience that even after the long first movement no one stirred or coughed or moved in the silence into which the slow movement eventually crept.  This was a very special performance, something one is lucky to experience once in a whole lifetime, when the player seems almost to cease to exist, and one is aware only of Schubert himself communicating directly with us. 

Hellens is to be congratulated on its gradual development as a really serious centre for music-making.  The acquisition of a top-flight Steinway shows their intent and commitment . (One hopes that they will give it the same care and preparation demanded by such a thoroughbred. Like racehorses, concert grands need the best of everything, and that does not and should not come cheap. Their jockeys, too, expect faultless preparation to their particular liking!)  On this showing, Hellens deserve to attract capacity audiences (as they did for this recital) for the programmes they now schedule, and they clearly want to exploit to the full the assets they have in this lovely converted barn in its equally lovely setting.  Let a wider public learn and take note.

                                                                                                                Peter Williams

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Sunday 2nd October – Last Day of Public Tours then House Closed for the Winter

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Saturday 24th September – Christian Blackshaw Concert

7:00 for 7:30 p.m. in the Great Barn

The second of two extraordinary concerts by        world- renowned pianist Christian Blackshaw here at Hellens.

Christian is soon to be guest soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic, and has recently played an acclaimed concert at the Wigmore Hall, so we are particularly excited that he will be visiting Herefordshire for this very special performance on our fine Steinway Concert Grand piano.

“Blackshaw’s performance was a revelation”  ****  The Independent (July 2011)

“While cut-glass textures, lilting melodies and featherweight finger work were all firmly in place, the main allure of Blackshaw’s interpretation lay in the ability to say so much while betraying so little”  ****  Financial Times (July 2011)

Tickets £15 (including a glass of wine during the interval), available from Hellens: 01531 660504 or info@hellensmanor.com

Programme

Mozart     Sonata in C minor, K. 457

Liszt          Vallee d'Obermann [from Annees de Pelerinage book 1'Suisse'']

Brahms    Klavierstucke, Op.119

Schubert  Sonata in B flat major, D. 960

www.christianblackshaw.com

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Sat 9th  July - Ledbury Poetry Festival- Modern Tunisian Poetry – Tahar Bekri, Amina Saïd and Marilyn Hacker – Gala Poetry

Performance & Supper 7.30pm – 10pm,  £20

Includes buffet supper

‘If your planes violate my sky/How can you wipe off your shadow /on the stones?’ (Tahar Bekri, transl. Prometeo). Tunisian poetry reflects the country’s extraordinary culture and its changing politics. Tonight’s gala performance opens with a reading by distinguished American poet Marilyn Hacker, who has translated much Tunisian poetry. Following a delicious supper we will hear readings by the poets Tahar Bekri and Amina Saïd in Arabic, French and English. Tahar Bekri and Amina Saïd are widely published, engaging presenters of their work. Food for the body and soul, in magical surroundings. Call Box office: 0845 458 1743 for tickets.

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Friday the 8th of July - Promises and Ploughmans in the Great Barn

Please join us at 7:30 p.m. for a super night of entertainment. We will be hosting a ploughmans supper followed by a 'Promises Auction' to raise money for Much Marcle CE School after which the infamous 'Slippermen' band will be playing us out until midnight. Tickets £10 per person from Hellens on 01531 660504 or info@hellensmanor.com

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Wednesday and Thursday the 6th and 7th of July – Textile Bazaar in the Great Barn

Come and visit this beautiful old house which has it’s history in the Domesday Book. Browse and buy among a cornucopia of lovely world textiles. John Gillow, renowned textile writer will be giving a lecture on Wednesday 6th at 6:30.

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Sun 3rd July - Ledbury Poetry Festival - Poetry Connections India: Poetry in Performance & Supper

7.30pm – 10pm,  £20- Includes buffet supper

UK poets Bill Herbert and Zoë Skoulding, Swiss German-language poet Raphael Urweider, and Indian poet Sampurna Chattarji showcase the multilingual poetry performance they created last December in the artists’ retreat Adi Shakti in South India. Call Box office: 0845 458 1743 for tickets.

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                     Saturday 25th June – Christian Blackshaw Concert - 7:00 for 7:30 p.m. in the Great Barn

We are proud to announce that world-renowned pianist Christian Blackshaw will be performing two concerts here at Hellens.  During 2011/12, he has received his first invitation from the Berliner Philharmoniker, and will present again at the Wigmore Hall. 

Tickets £12.50 available from Hellens: 01531 660504 or info@hellensmanor.com

Programme

Mozart        Sonata in F major, K533/494

Schubert    Sonata in C minor, D958

Schumann Fantazie in C major, op. 17

Please see Christian's website: www.christianblackshaw.com

Biography

Now "firmly back in the limelight" [Financial Times] Christian Blackshaw is recognised for the passion, range and sensitivity he brings to his extensive repertoire. His playing combines tremendous emotional depth with great understanding and, in the words of one London critic, "sheer musicality and humanity."

Pianist magazine, reviewing his performance of Schubert's great B Flat Sonata D. 960, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall wrote that the work "has become the calling-card of many a pianist wishing to declare themselves a musician's musician and Blackshaw most certainly belongs to this category."

Following studies with Gordon Green at the Royal College Manchester and Royal Academy, London and winning the gold medals at each, he was the first British pianist to study at the Leningrad Conservatoire with Moisei Halfin. He later worked closely with Sir Clifford Curzon in London.

Christian Blackshaw has performed with many leading orchestras including London Philharmonic, Hallé, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Academy of St-Martin-in-the Fields, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Moscow Philharmonic, Mariinsky Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Dresden Staatskapelle, Rotterdam Philharmonic and RAI Torino. Conductors with whom he has collaborated include Sir Simon Rattle, Valery Gergiev, Gianandrea Noseda, Yuri Temirkanov and Sir Neville Marriner.

He has given chamber concerts in London with the principals of the London Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe and festival engagements have taken him to Stars of the White Nights, St. Petersburg, Prague, Dubrovnik, Helsinki, Stresa, Britain in Greece Festival Athens, Bath, Snape and BBC Proms.

In December 2009 he completed the Mozart Sonata cycle at St. George’s Bristol to great critical acclaim. BBC Music Magazine wrote of his final concert that it was “one of the finest Mozart recitals I’ve heard in years.”

Forthcoming highlights include a Gala recital for the Chopin Society at the Guildhall, London, an all-Schubert recital at Snape Maltings, an appearance with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and recitals at LSO St. Luke's and at the Wigmore Hall during the 110th Anniversary season.

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24th April – House Opens for Public Tours

 

Create your own event!

If you have a special occasion to celebrate we can organise a mediaeval banquet in the Stone Hall (even in costume…) or a Pig Roast in the Great Barn.  Maybe a candlelit tour of the House followed by supper? Guest numbers can be from 20 to 150. We are happy to organise entertainment from a court jester to a string quartet or local band.  We work with local caterers and can plan your event with you. Just bring your imagination! Please call 01531 660 504 or email. info@hellensmanor.com to discuss.

Corporate

The Great Barn can accommodate up to 100 (or more) people, ideal for conferences, workshops or simply a corporate away day. Our Haywain Barn is smaller and more intimate but with the same facilities accommodating up to about 25 guests. Catering can be provided and projecting facilities are in place. Maybe incorporate a tour of the House during your visit? Use the gardens for treasure hunts or flying falcons! Hold a survival course in Hallwood? For further information and enquiries, please call 01531 660 504 or email info@hellensmanor.com

ActivitiesPerry Making - Big Apple Weekend- Come and Help!
The Mill House here at Hellens was built during the 19th century for Charles Radcliffe Cooke. At that time Hellens was surrounded by apple and pear orchards. Ancient perry pear trees can still be seen along our drive and we are planting a wide variety of apple and pear trees to continue the tradition.

Each year we make cider or perry in the traditional way at Hellens. First the pears are sorted to remove unwanted twigs, etc. Our horse and donkeys aren’t used to being harnessed, so we use volunteers to turn the millstone.

 

As the pears are crushed they are wrapped in hessian to make “cheeses” then formed into a stack, ready for pressing. When the stack is complete, pressure is applied to squeeze out the juice.