Sadly, I missed the concerts at St Mary's at the weekend, but I did happen to pop in for a Way-on-High magazine while one of the pianists was practicing on the magnificent Steinway Grand Piano that they had brought with them.
Which made me even more sorry that I missed the actual concerts.
Hay Music was busy over the Festival, but they aren't slowing down now. On Friday 12th June, at 7pm, the Sacconi String Quartet will be playing at St Mary's Church. Doors open at 6.30pm, and there will be a bar. Tickets are £20, or £10 for under 25s, with a few free tickets for under 25s on a first come, first served basis.
They'll be playing Mozart's quartet no. 19, which was called Dissonance when it was first performed (but only by the standards of the time - Mozart was just being a bit experimental), Smetana's "From my life" and Freya Waley-Cohen's Dances, Hymns and Songs for Friendship.
And in July there will be a series of piano concerts. All details on the Hay Music website.
My neighbour was sitting in her garden this morning when two children leaned over the wall.
"We're in a concert at the church this evening. You've got to come!"
So we walked down to the church together. Just in front of us, a kid with a violin case was charging full pelt down the hill, obviously thinking he was going to be late.
As we sat down, the two kids who had invited my neighbour looked back from their seats with thumbs up. "You came!"
The first half of the concert was performed by the professional pianist Jelena Makarova and soprano - the children were being introduced to a wide variety of music featuring rivers and the sea, starting with Benjamin Britten's arrangement of the folk song O, Waly, Waly, the Mermaid's Song by Haydn, a setting of a piece for choir done specially for Jessica Summers to sing with the piano by Colin Riley, called Never Coming Back, and At the River arranged by Aaron Copeland - one of those hymns that turns up in old Westerns.
Then it was the children's turn. Francesca Kay the poet had worked with Class 5 in four groups, each of which produced a very different river-themed poem, which composer Robert Peate set to music, including a very serious young drummer, a girl on the xylophone, various cymbals and percussion instruments, and two violinists - and the choir. They all looked as if they were enjoying themselves, and thoroughly deserved the applause after each song, and at the end. The poet said that she'd love to just go back to the school and write poetry with the kids until they told her to go away!
It was hugely enjoyable, and lots of people were leaving donations for further Outreach events in the future as they left.
It's not often Hay gets an entire symphony orchestra*, but Hay Music has organised a concert with the Hereford Symphony Orchestra this Saturday at 3pm (doors open at 2.30pm) in St Mary's Church.
Tickets are £20, under-25s £10. They will be playing Rossini's An Italian Girl in Algiers, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.
And it's a busy week for music lovers, because Songs of the River will be performed, also at St Mary's, on Thursday 26th March at 6pm. This is a project put together by the musicians and children of Hay School - composer Robert Peate, poet Francesca Kay, soprano Jessica Summers and pianist Jelena Makarova. This concert is free with a retiring collection in support of Hay Music's Outreach Programme.
*in fact, this is the first time!
Hay Music is starting off the New Year with an afternoon concert at St Mary's Church at 4pm on Saturday 10th January. I went down to the Tourist Information office to get my ticket yesterday.
The Lodestar Trio plays classical and baroque music on violin, Swedish nyckelharpa and Norwegian hardanger fiddle, which is quite a combination! They also play traditional and contemporary Nordic tunes.
Doors open at 3.30pm, and there will be a bar. Tickets are £20, and £10 for under-25s, with a limited number of free tickets for under-25 year olds, first come, first served.
Then on Saturday 31st January, at 6pm, there's a children's concert at Hay Castle. Tickets are £15, with under-25s free. The Solstice Collective wind quintet are doing Peter and the Wolf, with Felix Ashley as narrator.
I love Peter and the Wolf, and have happy memories of seeing Johnny Morris (of Animal Magic fame) narrate it at a concert at Lancaster University back in the 1980s. Sadly, I'll be away that weekend, so I won't be able to see this version.
It's going to be a busy Saturday for Hay Music at the end of August.
In the morning, from 11am at the Globe, is Shake, Rattle and Bash, a workshop for children from eight upwards. It costs £7.50 for an hour's session, and they will be making music to accompany the story Chico's Big Day Out.
Then in the afternoon, from 2pm, there's the adult session, Samba for Grown-ups, which will last 90 minutes and cost £10. You can learn all about the different instruments used in samba bands, and they might even have a second workshop if there is enough interest.
And in the evening, also at the Globe at 8pm, is Travels with my Marimba. Tickets are £10 or £5 for the under-25s.
In this talk, Chris Brannick and his friend Jackie Mann, who were running the daytime sessions, will be recounting tales and anecdotes from around the world, with a selection of percussion instruments from around the world. In a career that has spanned 30 years and working for the BBC Proms among other things, there'll be a lot to talk about.
The next Hay Music concert is on Friday 25th July, at 7pm at St. Mary's Church, and it sounds fascinating!
Lotte Betts-Dean is the mezzo soprano who will be singing with the Marsyas Trio and friends. They've performed in Hay before.
It's a varied programme, with Haydn and Debussy, Claude's Girl by Marika Hackman, and a piece by Schoenberg called Pierrot Lunaire. This is described as a piece that changed musical history. It was written in 1912, based on the Berlin cabaret, and is a cycle of 21 songs about the bizarre world of the clown-like Pierrot.
Tickets are £20, or £10 for the under-25s.
This is a bit late, because I didn't notice the dates!
But there is still time to book for the latest Hay Music events which are tonight, June 20th and tomorrow.
The Ferio Saxophone Quartet will be at the Castle tonight at 7.30pm, playing music from films, TV and stage. Tickets are £17.50.
And tomorrow they will be playing at a more formal concert at St Mary's Church, with classical music from Bach to Bernstein. Tickets are £20.
All the details, including ticket concessions, are available on the Hay Music website.
Hay Music has two interesting concerts coming up.
The first is Connect Four at St Mary's Church - four hands on one piano keyboard, playing Holst's Planet Suite, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Philip Wilby, and a piece by Emmanuel Chabrier and Andre Messager. The two players are Nigel Clayton and Imma Setiadi, and tickets are £20, or £10 for under 25s. The concert is on Friday 15th March, and the doors open at 6.30pm for a 7pm start.
Then up at the Castle there is harp music on Friday 4th April, also starting at 7pm. Alis Huws and members of Sinfonia Cymru will be playing as a harp quintet. They are starting with an illustrated introduction to the pieces they are going to play, followed by the pieces themselves - these are Song of the Lark by Charles Rochester Young, Quintet by Guy Ropartz, Song for an Ancient Tree by Eloise Glynn and Concert a cinq by Joseph Jongen.
This concert is £15, or £7.50 for the under 25s.
Hay Music are starting the year with a bang - a concert by the Marsyas Trio, with Australian soprano Lotte Betts-Dean at St Mary's, on Sunday 12th January, at 3pm (doors open at 2.30pm). Tickets are £20, and £10 for under-25s. ~The afternoon will include the world premiere of a work by Michael Finnissy, plus a work by Dame Judith Weir, who was Master of the Queen's Music (and then the King's Music) from 2014 to 2024.
Both the composers will be present at the concert, and they will join the players in a pre-concert conversation, which will make it quite a special occasion.
There will also be music by Ravel and Saint-Saens.
I'm also looking forward to February, when the Engegard String Quartet will be playing Norwegian Folk Music at the Clobe on Saturday 15th from 8pm, followed by classical music on the Sunday afternoon (Beethoven and Brahms) and more traditional Norwegian folk songs.
The church was packed again for the Christmas concert by Kings College London Choir.
It wasn't exactly a carol concert, though some carols were included - the glorious finale was Joy to the World and they also sang the Coventry Carol (probably the only Christmas carol about the Massacre of the Innocents by King Herod), and Three Kings from Persian lands afar. During the course of the concert, I was very impressed to see that the choristers were singing in Russian and Latin as well as English.
The first half was music by Taverner and Rachmaninoff.
I had a vague recollection that I'd heard choral music by Taverner before, and I was right - his Song for Athene was performed at Princess Diana's funeral. This time, the pieces were Ikon of the Nativity and As One Who Has Slept, both solemn and complex harmonies, bookending the much longer six part Vespers from Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, which was heavily based on Orthodox chants.
I think my favourite pieces came in the second half - the conductor, Dr Joseph Fort, had constructed the order of music around four linked pieces by Poulenc, written after he had seen a series of frescos about the Nativity story in Florence. One of the things that struck him about the frescos was that the angels all seemed to be having fun, making faces at each other, and sticking their tongues out! Hence his comment: "Angels aren't always saints". So some of that music is very jolly, especially the piece about the shepherds.
To pair with each of the Poulenc pieces, he chose The Coventry Carol and In the stillness by Sally Beamish for the first (Christ lying in the manger); Angelus ad pastores ait by Raffealla Aleotti for the shepherds; O Radiant Dawn by James Macmillan and The Three Kings carol for the wise men, and Joy to the World to follow the last Poulenc piece, Hodie Christus natus est (Today Christ is born).
It was all absolutely sublime.
Hay Music has a full programme of concerts already planned out for next year, the first being The Marsyas Trio on Sunday 12th January at 3pm. As usual, tickets are available through Hay Music or the Tourist Bureau.
The concert last night at St Mary's, organised by Hay Music, was absolutely wonderful.
The performers were Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux on violin, and Ben Tarlton on cello, and they spent the morning in local schools doing music workshops with the children.
The music they played was mostly unfamiliar to me - which is the main reason I go to concerts. I want to discover something new.
The first half was heavily Eastern European, and early 20th century, music from Reinhold Gliere, Bela Bartok and Erwinn Schulhoff. I'd heard of Bartok, of course, but I didn't know about his work collecting folk music around Hungary. The music played was a selection from his duos for two violins, arranged for violin and cello, and written as a series of lessons for violin, from easiest to most difficult.
The other two composers were new to me. Gliere was a Soviet composer, though the piece that was played came from before the Soviet Union, in 1909 - and my problem here is that I don't know how to describe music. I can only say that it was beautiful and I'll be looking out for recordings by the composer in future.
Schulhoff was Czech (that's been a bit of a theme this week!), and is described in the concert notes as a virtuosic tour de force, which seems accurate. They played fast; they played slow; they plucked the strings - it was incredible to watch. Another composer I'll be looking out for in future.
The second half was made up of two pieces, one by Mozart and one by Ravel - so I was familiar with the composers, but not these particular pieces. Charlotte explained that they had chosen the Ravel piece to end the concert because of the relationships between it and the Schulhoff piece - so another virtuosic tour de force, which was recieved with rapturous applause.
As an encore, they played a short tango, which was lovely.
The next Hay Music concert will be part of Hay Winter Festival, and after that there is the Christmas Concert by the Choir of King's College London on Saturday 14th December at 7pm.
Jayson Gillham has been to Hay before. He's a concert pianist, and for this upcoming concert he will be playing Beethoven, Chopin and Fauré.
The concert will be at St Mary's Church, on Saturday 26th October, starting at 7pm. Tickets are £20, and for under-25s £10. There will also be a small number of free tickets for under-25s, on a first come, first served basis. There will also be a bar.
Then on Friday 15th November, also at St Mary's Church, Ben Tarlton will be playing cello and Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux will be playing violin. These performers are new to Hay, and will be playing pieces by Mozart, Ravel and Bartok among others - I'm pretty sure that duets for cello and violin are quite unusual, so that should be an interesting concert. Tickets for this one are £17.50, with under-25 tickets at £8.
The box office is open for the ninth Hay Music Festival - a weekend of concerts, films and discussions from Friday September 13th to Sunday September 15th.
There's even a whole Festival ticket, costing £105, to cover all the events apart from the Hay Remembers guided walk and the two films, which are paid for separately.
One of the films, Testimony, is a life of Shostakovich starring Ben Kingsley, and the other is The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci's dark comedy, so there's a definite Russian theme to the festival this year. Music by Shostakovich is included in most of the concerts and there's also a lecture/discussion about the composer.
The concerts include the Fitzwilliam String Quartet and Sinfonia Cymru string quartet at St Mary's Church as well as a piano and cello concert.
Meanwhile at the Castle there's an experimental composer performing The Inside-Out Piano.
All the details and ticket prices are on the Hay Music Trust website.
Hay Music is going for percussion tomorrow night with the Ensemble Bash Quartet in Hay Castle at 7.30pm. Tickets are £17.50 or £8.75 for under 25s. Their programme includes traditional drumming from Senegal.
The following day, at the Globe, there will be an interactive Samba drumming session starting at 11am. It's for adults, but can include any age from 12 upwards.
Meanwhile at St. Mary's Church, Hay Madrigals and the Ystradivarius Ensemble are having a concert at 3.30pm on Saturday 13th. Tickets are £10 on the door, with tea, coffee, wine and cakes afterwards.
Some time ago, I was given a discount card by the organisers of Hay Music, and this is the first time I've made use of it.
The Quartet is named for Sir Michael Tippett, a composer who died in 1998, so of course they played his 5th Quartet. This was dedicated to Sally Groves when it was first performed in 1992, and she happened to be in the audience last night!
The first piece they played was Vaughan Williams' first string quartet, which he wrote after studying with Ravel in France, and somehow it manages to be very French, but instantly recognisable as Vaughan Williams at the same time.
After the interval, they launched into Schubert's string quartet known as Death and the Maiden. This was written in 1824, so this is its 200th anniversary. It's a thrilling piece of music, building up to a great finale, and it was lovely to see the cellist smiling to himself as he played - it obviously takes a lot of concentration to play, but he was still enjoying himself. The applause at the end was rapturous.
The Tippett Quartet plays a wide variety of classical music - they had several CDs for sale at the back of the church, and I was delighted to find a recording of Korngold's string quartets. I've known Korngold's music most of my life - he wrote the scores for several Errol Flynn movies! I'm less familiar with his chamber music, so I shall be settling down later to enjoy that.
Hay Music have organised several concerts during Hay Festival, and the next non-Festival concert will be on 21st June at Hay Castle, with A4 Brass Quartet. The quartet is formed of musicians from some of the best known brass bands in the country, including Brighouse and Rastrick, Fodens and Black Dyke, and they have a varied programme to play. Tickets cost £20, or £10 for under-25s.
The latest concert organised by Hay Music will be the Tippett String Quartet, on Friday 10th May at 7pm at St Mary's Church. They will be playing music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Michael Tippett and Franz Schubert.
The Lark Ascending, by Vaughan Williams, is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music, so I'm looking forward to hearing some of his music for quartets.
Tickets are £20, or £10 for under 25s, and there are a few free tickets for under 25s on a first come, first served basis.
The next Hay Music concert is on Friday 12th April (so, not long now!).
The New London Chamber Ensemble is playing at St Mary's Church at 7pm. They are a wind quintet - flute, French horn, clarinet, oboe and bassoon. Tickets are £20, with a limited number of free tickets for under 25s, as well as the usual half price tickets for under 25s.
They will be playing quite a bit of Mozart, including the Adagio for glass harmonica, as well as Ravel, Beethoven and Rachel Stott.
Hay Music are going to be busy over the next couple of months.
The New London Chamber Ensemble will be playing in St Mary's Church on Friday 12th April at 7pm. Tickets are £20, or £10 for under 25s. There are also a few free tickets for under 25s on a first come, first served basis.
This is the first time the wind quintet has come to Hay, and they will be playing a mixture of Mozart, Beethoven, Ravel and Rachel Stott.
And on 10th May, the Tippett String Quartet will be playing.
Hay Music is also organising several concerts during Hay Festival.
On Saturday 25th May at 7.30pm at St Mary's Church, the Hay Chamber Choir will be performing The Dymock Poets Reimagined. Tickets are £15 from the Festival ticket office.
The concert features settings of works by the Dymock poets by seven contemporary composers.
On Sunday 26th May at 1pm, at St Mary's Church, Clare Hammond will be playing piano. Tickets are £18 from the Festival ticket office.
The programme starts with Clara Schumann and Beethoven, followed by Samy Moussa, Mozart and Cecile Chaminade.
On Saturday 1st June, The Fidelio Trio will be performing in St Mary's Church at 1pm. Tickets are £18 from the Festival ticket office.
