3/1/2024 0 Comments Julian lloyd webber eyesThese included the award-winning Hungarian pianist Gergely Bogányi and the impressionist Alistair McGowan, who played music by Satie and Grieg. Using three Steinway concert grands, period pianos and harpsichords and for a ticket price of one pound, audiences on Friday night and Saturday morning listened to more than 20 pianists. The conservatoire staged an all-night “pianothon” inspired by the all-night jazz sessions at Birmingham’s town hall in the 1950s and 60s. This weekend saw a typically adventurous bit of programming. Lloyd Webber believes this period of risk-taking has been instructional. I had never learned and I certainly was not going to try it out on Grappelli.”Ībove the public areas and venues will be rooms for practising and then the technical control rooms.ĭuring the wait for the new building, the conservatoire has made use of a wide range of public spaces. “I played with Stéphane Grappelli once, and the others were happy to play something different each night. “We have modelled it on Ronnie Scott’s in London and we’re calling it East Side Jazz,” said Lloyd Webber, 65, adding that, while he enjoyed jazz, he found the idea of improvising difficult. A “lab” venue will stage experimental work, while an organ recital room will sit above a dark-panelled jazz club. ![]() ![]() There will be three other performances spaces, each built as separate “boxes” to prevent sound or vibrations from leaking out. Another supporter is Prince Edward, who is the conservatoire’s patron and is expected to visit when the building is finished.īy then the foyer will be covered with ash floorboards and the main concert hall and the smaller recital room will be oak-panelled. The conductor Sir Simon Rattle, who is shortly to return to Britain from the Berlin Philharmonic to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, is president of the conservatoire and has a close association with the city in which he made his name in the 80s and 90s with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The new pale brick structure sits next to the city’s Millennium Point building and between the Birmingham City University campus, the Thinktank science museum, and Birmingham Ormiston Academy for creative, digital and performing arts, known as “the Brummie fame academy”. Staff and students have had to leave the old conservatoire, along with the former Adrian Boult Hall, because of the redevelopment of the Paradise Circus area of the city. ![]() Let me tell you nothing is as scary as having to go out in front of an audience and play a Britten symphony.”Īn impression of how the finished building will look. Lloyd Webber’s performing experience had helped him at Birmingham, he said, where he had to present the public face of the conservatoire, as well as teaching cello: “I can handle speaking in public. A year later he was appointed principal in Birmingham. ![]() In April 2014 the cellist announced his early retirement from the concert hall due to a painful neck condition that limited movement in his right arm. “And I needed the demands of a big job like this to help me adjust from a performing career.” “I feel as if I have inherited the interest,” Lloyd Webber said. His father, the composer and organist William Lloyd Webber, was director of the London College of Music, and as a child he overheard many discussions about teaching methods and funding negotiations. The internationally renowned cellist, younger brother of the composer of Evita and The Phantom of the Opera, Lord Lloyd-Webber, suspects music education is “in his blood”. “It is quite a moment for the country, let alone the city, because this conservatoire, the first to be newly built in Britain since 1987, may well be the last because of the reduction in funding for music,” he said. He sees the conservatoire as an architectural champion of the people’s music, becoming a venue for all kinds of public performance and academic experimentation. Despite the highbrow title “conservatoire”, and all the hi-tech digital equipment being installed, Lloyd Webber promises that the institution, which has recently produced successful musicians such as singer-songwriter Laura Mvula, concert pianist Duncan Honeybourne and conductor Michael Seal, will stay connected to the people living and working around it.
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