Pre-Concert Talk: Peter Quantrill – Small Steps and Giant Leaps
Pre-Concert Talk: Peter Quantrill – endeavour, progress and pioneering achievements To tie in with the Bloomsbury Festival, which is taking place at Conway Hall during the weekend, journalist and musicologist Peter Quantrill discusses the development of the string quartet and its early pioneers. This free event will be followed by the evening’s Sunday Concert, in […]
Pre-Concert Talk: Robert Hugill – Arrangement, Transcription and Popularisation
British composer, journalist, and lecturer Robert Hugill, returns to Conway Hall for a free Pre-Concert Talk, exploring arrangement, transcription and popularisation in classical chamber music. Arrangements and transcriptions were everywhere in the late 18th and 19th centuries, from Beethoven symphonies for piano duet to Rossini for wind octet. Beethoven even did some himself, producing a […]
Camerata Alma Viva
Camerata Alma Viva make a welcome return to Conway Hall as part of their European tour and new album release. Mozart | Divertimento in F K138 Handel arr. Mouret | Passacaglia from Keyboard Suite no. 7 in G minor HWV 432 Mozart | Divertimento in B flat K137 Kabalevsky arr. Mouret | Waltz from The Comedians Op. 26 Mozart | Divertimento in D […]
Book Launch – The Trap by Ludovic Bruckstein
The Trap and The Rag Doll are two novellas by the Romanian writer Ludovic Bruckstien, that have remained undiscovered for many years. Now his son has brought together the collected works of his father, revealing a rich world of Jewish culture from the Maramureș region of northern Romania. Both narratives are concerned with extraordinary stories of survival and […]
Songs Of Hope by Vocal Chords Acapella Choir & Guests
This benefit concert will raise funds for Culture Declares Emergency on Climate Change. — Founded in 2013 by Melanie Harrold, Vocal Chords is a South East London acapella harmony choir open to anyone who can sing. Melanie, former lead singer with the Hank Wangford Band and now with the fabulous Daphne’s Flight, currently taking the […]
Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames
Mudlark (/’mAdla;k/) noun A person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbour Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over fifteen years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes […]
In Praise of Walking: The New Science of how we Walk and why it’s Good for us
Walking enabled us to walk out of Africa and to spread as far as Alaska and Australia. It freed our hands and freed our minds. We put one foot in front of the other without thinking – yet how many of us know how we do that, or appreciate the advantages it gives us? In […]
Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined
What is masculinity? Dominating the world around us, from Trump’s twitter outbursts to deadly gun violence, from male suicide rates to incels on Reddit and 4chan, masculinity is perceived to be ‘toxic’, ‘fragile’ and ‘in crisis’. In his book Mask Off, JJ Bola exposes masculinity as a performance that men are socially conditioned into. Using […]
Lawless: A lawyer’s fight for justice in a war zone
In the summer of 2008 Kimberley Motley quit her job as a public defender in Milwaukee to join a program that helped train lawyers in war-torn Afghanistan. She was thirty-two at the time, a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States. What she brought to Afghanistan was a toughness and resilience […]