City of London Sinfonia’s (CLS) hugely popular concert series CLoSer, returns for its fourth season following its successful launch in 2011. Offering audiences bitesize concerts and the opportunity to get closer to one of London’s leading orchestras, the first concert in the series, CLoSer: The Entertainments, will be on 21 October 2014, 7.30pm at Village Underground, Shoreditch.
CLoSer concerts are shorter in length and more relaxed in style than a traditional concert setting. Far from large concert halls and churches, these concerts take place in the Shoreditch warehouse venue, Village Underground. The experience is designed to appeal to those who like live music experiences to be intimate and informal, and allows the audience to get much closer to the music and the musicians than a traditional set-up. Throughout the concert, audience members are also encouraged to go to the bar and grab a drink. While short in length, the concerts still present audiences with challenging and interesting repertoire with ‘talking’ programme notes throughout the performance. For those who wish to linger post concert, the bar remains open, and there is the chance to mingle with CLS musicians too.
For this concert, CLS, under conductor Michael Collins, is joined by director Max Webster and actors Richard Hope and Emma Pallant for a performance of Korngold’s music for Much Ado About Nothing and Shostakovich’s outrageous re-working of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shostakovich’s Hamlet, which borrows freely from cabaret and film music, is a visceral political satire, first performed against the backdrop of Stalin’s cultural pogroms of the early 1930s. This concert features an abridged version of the play as the original text has since been lost. First performed in 1920, Korngold’s music for Much Ado About Nothing, reveals why he became one of the pioneers of the Hollywood film music industry later in his life.
The concert is also part of City of London Sinfonia’s Shakespeare: Let Music Sound concert series, celebrating the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth with some of the most well-known music for film and theatre inspired by his plays. Shakespeare has always been intimately connected to music: not only are his words wonderfully musical, but the original productions were full of incidental music, songs and always ended with a jig. Over the years Shakespeare’s work has inspired many composers in very different ways. Throughout this series, together with director Max Webster, CLS tries to dramatise the relationship between playwright and composer, and explore how words and music were conceived by different composers to form one over-arching musical structure.
Ticketing and booking information:
‘CLoSer: Shakespeare – The Entertainments’
City of London Sinfonia/Michael Collins/ Max Webster (director)/Richard Hope/ Emma Pallant
21 October 2014, 7.30pm, Village Underground, London
Box Office: Spitalfields Music Box Office: spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk / 020 7377 1362.
Tickets:
Special promotion for MIS readers – get the tickets to the concert for £10 with a free drink using the code MADE14.
£15 (includes a free drink) / £5 for students (no free drink, available with promo code accessed by pre-registering at www.cls.co.uk/CLS-FIVER)
CLoSer is a partnership between City of London Sinfonia and Spitalfields Music in association with Village Underground. The series is supported by Arts Council England, M&G Investments, The London Community Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts.
