James Jolly, Editor-in-Chief:
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29-31 October 2021 in venues across Elgar Country
Ken's Third Season as Artistic Director
Highlights include:
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There will surely be electricity in the air as Kenneth Woods and the ESO perform Elgar’s beloved Enigma Variations, a timeless celebration of friendship and community, and the perfect work with which to welcome our friends and listeners back. It’s been over two years since the triumphant 100th Anniversary performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto for a packed Worcester Cathedral at the 2019 Elgar Festival. It’s time to let the music play again and to celebrate the life and music of Britain’s greatest composer.
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Cellist Raphael Wallfisch, whose deeply-moving 100th Anniversary performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto was the undoubted highlight of the 2019 Elgar Festival, returns with a sequence of engaging miniatures for cello and strings arranged by Donald Fraser. The programme opens with Elgar’s much loved Serenade, and concludes with the playful and witty “Little Music” for strings by the English String Orchestra’s former “Composer-in-Association”, Sir Michael Tippett. Finally, there’s a musical after-dinner sorbet, Evan Chambers virtuosic and hilarious setting of two Irish jigs, The Tall-Eared Fox and the Wild-Eyed Man. It’s an evening celebrating the best of English string music with one of the world’s most admired string orchestras, Worcester’s own English String Orchestra.
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"Woods is a world-class Mahler conductor. The 5th, which we heard last night at MahlerFest in Boulder, is a supremely challenging work, full of explosive contradictions and wild shifts of mood. To successfully perform this requires a conductor who knows how to balance the incredibly complex counterpoint and guide the ear along, how to sustain momentum through all the twists and turns, and how to navigate one transition after another to keep it from sounding episodic. Add to that, conducting an orchestra.... making them all play better than themselves, and bringing them together into a single expressive vision. Imagine riding a unicycle on a tightrope during a hurricane and juggling flaming sticks while singing a song with such heart that the audience is reduced to tears. That's Ken for you." Chris Mohr, Host "Classical Music from Aspen Festival" on Aspen Public Radio.
"MahlerFest artistic director Kenneth Woods prepared his orchestra with great care and confidence. This was the most technically polished and emotionally engaged performance since his tenure began in 2016. ... Like the Mahler Fifth, the new Sawyers symphony has five movements. The music was ingratiating to the ear, and the structure was interesting and easy to follow.....
"It speaks to the professionalism and skill of the orchestra that the players rose to the daunting task Woods had set for them in presenting a brand-new large-scale symphony along with a demanding Mahler work--and delivering a nearly flawless performance of the latter. Speaking of the audience, it was unexpectedly large, both in consideration of the pandemic and based on typical MahlerFest attendance in past years....
"With Mahler’s sprawling and powerful Symphony No. 5, Woods delivered just about the best performance I have heard at MahlerFest....
"Sawyers was selected to pair with Mahler’s Fifth in part because of his affinity with Mahler’s works. He writes large, multi-movement symphonies that cover a wide emotional spectrum, and he makes each work a journey that leads to a definite conclusion. The emotional content is perceptible on the surface... Not that Sawyers Fifth Symphony sounds like Mahler as such. He has his own contemporary style and harmonic palette... it's an attractive, intriguing symphony, well worth hearing again. The performance was delivered with attention and affection for the music. Woods and the orchestra made every expressive gesture clear and impactful, providing the full dynamic range that Sawyers' calls for..
"Mahler famously said that the symphony “must be like the world” and the “embrace everything,” and that is almost true of just the first movement of the Fifth. It covers a dizzying array of musical topics, from ceremonial march to sentimental dance. It is this variety that makes Mahler’s symphonies such a challenge to a conductor, who has to manoeuvre an orchestra through all of Mahler’s minefields of shifting tempos and surging emotional fluctuations...Woods handled this like the veteran Mahlerian he is. There was never a sense of tentativeness about tempo, any hesitation around entrances, or anything less than full commitment to the extremes of emotional expression. Especially impressive was the third movement Scherzo, a tour-de-force of high-paced peasant dances interrupted by a moment of pure schmaltz, and then a grotesque moment of pizzicato strings, each effective in its turn....
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Listen on-demand as host Fred Child presents the English Symphony Orchestra's recording of Ken's arrangement of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden, Variations and Lied for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra" with soprano April Fredrick. Broadcast on 1 October.
You can order the complete CD, Visions of Childhood, consisting of Ken's arrangements of music by Mahler, Wagner, Schubert and Humperdinck, via the Downbeat Store here.
“an astonishingly good CD with stunning orchestral arrangements by ESO’s principal conductor, Kenneth Woods” ArtsMuse, London
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ESO's Triumphant Return to Live Music
With Full House in St Peters', Hereford
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"Lento for Strings... began as the slow movement of the First Quartet by Doreen Carwithen. Although she left a notable output of concert and film music, Carwithen (1922-2003) is remembered mainly through her association with William Alwyn – being his amanuensis from 1961 and second wife from 1975 for the final decade of his life. At the time of this quartet, she was a promising composer in her own right, as confirmed by Woods’s adaptation of the slow movement so that its prevailing intimacy and introspection lose none of their acuity. The ESO played it with requisite poise and finesse, not least those plangent solos for viola and violin that were eloquently rendered here by Matt Maguire and Kate Suthers, thereby resulting in an atmospheric miniature which warrants frequent revival."
"Mendelssohn was just a year older when he completed his Italian symphony... Woods undoubtedly had its measure – whether in an Allegro (exposition repeat included) whose joyousness did not exclude more combative energy from its development and coda, an Andante whose journeying pilgrims were evoked with no little pathos, an intermezzo deftly revisiting the wide-eyed enchantment of the composer’s youth, or a finale whose interplay of saltarello and tarantella rhythms surged on to a decisive close."
"Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is one of a select few in its genre whose weight and substance justifies its occupying the whole second half. Alexander Sitkovetsky responded accordingly...The highlight of this performance came with the Larghetto, slower than is often now the case but its sequence of variations melding into each other with seamless elegance, with a rapport between soloist and conductor at its most tangible in the theme’s hushed reiteration prior to a spirited transition into the Rondo."
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Critical response to the
Béla Bartók
April Fredrick - Judit
David Stout - Kékszakállú
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"Kenneth Woods’ economical, almost austere, and always well-paced conducting building huge intensity from his socially-distanced players in a resourceful orchestral reduction...
"Fredrick sings with intense involvement, nuancing her delivery to match every shift in Judith’s psyche. And Stout is simply compelling and engrossing, both attractive and tormented...
"At just over an hour this is an emotionally draining experience. Concentration from the ESO players was remarkable, bringing great colour to the interludes between the opening of each of the seven fateful doors, and the sheer absorption from the two soloists, discreetly marshalled by Woods, leapt out from the screen." Chris Morley, Birmingham Post
"With minimal stage action indicated, Bluebeard’s Castle is ideally suited for concertante settings, as the riveting online production by the English Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director & Principal Conductor Kenneth Woods resoundingly demonstrates....
"...the superlative ESO and Woods team, joined by the powerfully connective duo of Stout and Fredrick, deliver one of the most captivating performances of Bluebeard’s Castle in the online archives." Jari Kallio, Adventures in Music
"....the ESO plays to its customary high standards throughout a score which, if never as radical as works of this period by Schoenberg or Stravinsky, remains a testing assignment with the integration of overtly expressionist tendencies into music of a Straussian opulence. This reduction loses little in either respect, due notably to a piano part as achieves more than textural filling-in then a harmonium part adding substance and atmosphere in equal measure. Kenneth Woods paces these 65 minutes with an acute sense of where the drama is headed." Richard Whitehouse, Arcana.FM
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Five wonderful new storytelling works for narrator and orchestra by Kile Smith, David Yang, Jay Reise, Tom Kraines and Ken Woods, performed by the English Symphony Orchestra.
Starring Hugh Bonneville, Davood Ghadami, Henry Goodman and Gemma Whelan.
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From the Archives
Ken's first Mahler recording
arr. for chamber ensemble by
Arnold Schoenberg
David Stout, Emma Curtis and Brennen Guillory
Somm Records
“Kenneth Woods leads the Orchestra of the Swan on a near-symphonic scale.. a richly balanced performance that easily stands out” Ken Smith, Gramophone Magazine
"...the performance by Emma Curtis and the orchestra is one of the utmost sensitivity. The wind and string solos are all prominent, and beautifully played, as before, and Woods’ control of the ebbs and flows of the pulse is unerring….a finale that was magical in its tenderness…something that every lover of Mahler should hear.” Guy Aron, MusicWeb
“The way in which singers, players and conductor connect with the music is remarkable and very moving. Highly recommended.” Peter Reed, Classical Source
“the shifting temperature of Mahler’s world is painted with precise splashes of colour…Woods brilliantly captures the contrasting desolation of the second song… here, as throughout the disc, the instrumentalists are in superb form, playing with Jugendstil sweep at the close and a brittle chirpiness in ‘Von der Jugend’…” Gavin Plumley, Entartete Musik
”Indeed, elegance is a good description of Woods’ approach to these songs; he coaxes glorious sounds from his players and, thanks to a good recording and quiet audience, every nudge and nuance is easily heard. The aching loveliness of Die zwei blauen Augen has seldom been so feelingly caught, those dragging rhythms so well judged. Crowning it all is Stout’s fine-spun singing; really, this is a voice I would travel many miles to hear. I’ve added him to my list of singers to watch. And if that’s not enough, the beautifully-turned orchestral coda has a sustained, heart-stopping delicacy I’ve rarely encountered in this oft-played song… supremely well-played and well-sung” Dan Morgan, MusicWeb
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Click on the cover to learn more or order a copy
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Kenneth Woods is Artistic Director and Conductor of the: |
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