London Piano Trio - Kaleidoscope Sky & The Shape of Freedom Concert

Robert Atchison

Robert Atchison - violin
Jackie Hartley - violin
Elisa Bergerson - viola
David Jones - cello
Kia Bennett - flute
Simon Callaghan - piano
Tim Carey - piano

2nd April 2022
Maclaren Hall,
11-13 Mandeville Place,
London,
W1U 3AJ

Jacqueline Hartley

Convivium Records launch two exciting new CDs, Kaleidoscope Sky & The Shape of Freedom by the Robert Atchison, London Piano Trio and friends.
Rosner & Cooman: Kaleidoscope Sky - https://conviviumrecords.co.uk/product/kaleidoscope-sky/
Elena Pavlea: The Shape of Freedom - https://conviviumrecords.co.uk/product/the-shape-of-freedom/

Both recordings were made during two phases of lockdown, which was an achievement in itself. In the words of violinist Robert Atchison “This concert is like a relaunch of our existence as artists and a return to normal live performances, I’m so excited!”

David Jones

London Piano Trio
“Simply World Class” is the description made by the German press of the London Piano Trio. For the past 20 years the London Piano Trio have been touring, recording, and teaching across the globe to rave reviews. Upcoming tours include a 10 city tour of China in 2020 and a Far East Tour in 2021. At home they have been described as a “National Treasure”.
http://www.londonpianotrio.com/

Simon Callaghan

Elena Pavlea
Elena Pavlea’s compositional output is influenced by Neo-romantic and Minimalistic musical genres.
Born and raised in Athens, Greece, she discovered classical music at an early age, undertaking her first piano lessons aged seven and composing her first piano pieces aged eight. In her own words, she relates, “I quickly realized that composition was something I felt I needed to pursue. I feel that music can help me to express myself in an honest and sincere way.”

Elisa Bergerson 

Southern Sinfonia
Southern Sinfonia’s reputation continues to grow as the leading professional Chamber Orchestra in the South of England. With Sir Roger Norrington as its Patron the orchestra, established in 1990, is now developing its exciting new residency at Queen’s College in Taunton, Somerset, alongside its other continuing relationships under its new Artistic Director/Conductor, Simon Chalk.

Tim Carey 

Expressive Audio
Expressive Audio is a family run business, established in 2017 on the South Coast of England. In 2021 we moved our base of operations to Lincolnshire, but retain a presence in Hampshire. We love music and cinema, and we are passionate about helping people to get the most out of their record, CD, streaming, and movie collections. Our aim is to allow you to get as close as possible to the experience of live entertainment, from the safety and comfort of your own home. Whether you prefer analogue or digital, have a large budget or small, and want new, used, or a mix, we're here to meet all your audio, visual, and home automation needs.

https://expressiveaudio.com/

London Violins - A World in London exhibition

London Violins

A World in London exhibition

Menuhin Hall, Cobham Road, Stoke d'Abernon, Surrey, KT11 3QQ, February to June 2018

Official launch night 6.30-7.30pm, 6th June 2018 on A World in London at Resonance FM

https://resonancefm.com/ TUNE IN!!! Special guest Alice Barron from the Iyatra Quartet.

Exhibition open for daytime viewing: weekdays 10am-12.30pm & 1pm -3pm.
www.yehudimenuhinschool.co.uk
www.themenuhinhall.co.uk

An exhibition of 24 drawings by artist Alban Low documenting the performances of London violinists. Alban has been sketching the capital’s musicians for ten years, spending his evenings in concert halls and jazz clubs. In 2016 he joined the radio programme A World in London, sketching musicians as they play live in the studio. The drawings you see here are of 8 violinists and the musicians they regularly play with. All the musicians have been featured on A World in London.

The radio programme ‘A World in London’ has been at the heart of the capital’s music scene since 2007. Originally broadcast on the BBC, it is now based at SOAS Radio (University of London) and Resonance FM. Hosted and produced by DJ Ritu, the show has an unrivalled reputation for presenting a rich cultural mix that truly reflects the diverse musical tastes of London and its people. DJ Ritu and Alban Low are producing a series of exhibitions and books that document the ever-changing live music scene in London. London stirs with musicians from all nations, playing in

venues from grand concert halls to vibrant upstairs rooms in pubs. This series aims to capture a moment in those musicians’ lives and tell the story of their favourite venues.

Listen to A World in London HERE.

The book ‘London Violins: Part 1’ (A World in London chapbook, ISBN 9781910578773)

accompanies this exhibition.

Alban Low is involved in many creative projects, including album artwork, live performance, making films and maps, conceptual exhibitions, publishing chapbooks and good old-fashioned drawing. He is artist-in-residence at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston University and St George's University of London.

www.albanlow.com

www.artofjazz.blogspot.co.uk

DJ Ritu is a pioneering international turntablist & BBC Radio presenter. In the ‘90s she co-founded Outcaste Records, signing Nitin Sawhney and Badmarsh & Shri. Ritu has also broadcast for BBC World Service, Kiss 100 and many others. She manages two London club nights, Kuch Kuch and Club Kali, which are the longest running Bollywood events in the UK.

Musicians featured in the exhibition

James Patrick Gavin and Tad Sargent
Alice Barron and George Sleightholme
Olga Baron and John Macnaughton
Robert Atchison and Olga Dudnik
Agnes Branner and Martin Weightman
Anna Lowenstein and Rey Yusuf
Sarah Montague and Andrew Ryser Szymański
Richard Jones and Christian Miller

A special thank you to Chris Holley, Sofia Gaetani-Morris, Norman Druker and Sophie Darling for supporting this exhibition. 

London Piano Trio - Viva Espana

Francis Rayner

London Piano Trio
Robert Atchison - violin
David Jones - cello
Francis Rayner - piano

Date - 27th November 2016
Venue - St John's Smith Square, London
Current album - Sonata for Pianoforte - Trio for Violin, Cello & Piano by Christopher Gunning

Robert Atchison

Future Performance
12th March 2017 - St John's Arts & Recreation Centre, Harlow, ENGLISH IDYLL
26th March 2017 - St John's Smith Square, London, ENGLISH IDYLL

"Simply World Class" is the description made by the German press of the London Piano Trio. For the past 17 years the London Piano Trio have been touring, recording, and teaching across the globe to rave reviews. Upcoming tours include a 10 city tour of China in 2017 and a Far East Tour in 2018. At home they have been described as a "National Treasure". They were artists in residence at the Gibbs Music Festival from 2008 - 2014 and current activities include a residency at St John's Smith Square in London, recently featuring a critically acclaimed 2015 Beethoven Cycle and artists in residence at the Festival Jalesnes, Venantes, France.

David Jones

Their interest in promoting English music has resulted in them recording the complete trios of Donald Francis Tovey, Henry Cotter Nixon, and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, with many premiere performances in places such as Dubai, Singapore, Manila, Naples, and Paris. They have actively commissioned works by composers such as Christopher Gunning, Jed Balsamo, Gavin Bryers, Clement Ishmael, Constantin Papageorgiou, Giya Kanchelli and Philip Glass.

Programme 27th November 2016
Piano Trio No.2 in B Minor Op.76 (Turina)
Four Spanish pieces (Bretón)
Piano Trio in C (Cassadó)
Piano Trio Op.50 (Granados)

            

London Piano Trio - Beethoven Cycle

Robert Atchison

London Piano Trio
Robert Atchison - violin
Olga Dudnik - piano
David Jones - cello

Date - 29th November 2015
Venue - St John's Smith Square
Current Album - Oleg Komarnitsky

Olga Dudnik

Next concert - 17th January 2016, St John's Smith Square

The cries of protestors echoed in the Whitehall streets just beyond the shadow cast by St John's Smith Square imposing bulk. There was a decadence, like Rome was burning outside and we sat there gorging ourselves on fine wine and good music.
A storm was being stoked, we could see the dark branches swaying through the leached glass.

Beethoven Piano Trio No.5 in D Op.70 No.1 'Ghost'.
(ii) Largo assai ed espressivo
Jagged spires and jagged light, long thin architectural glass. The piano of Olga Dudnik is the raindrops. It is a changing day, we think beyond the inconsequential passages in light and temperature, we are beyond this. The small cycles of life on earth are seen as though through glass, through the 'wrong' end of a telescope. We are the witnesses, we are the children of a higher being, with our pathetic stumbles and downcast eyes.
Olga Dudnik doesn't play by the same rules as us mortals. Robert Atchison and David Jones have the fineness and lightness of the panes we touch with our hands, we see through their eyes.


Robert Atchison

(iii) Presto
Zipped up and down.
Thousands of shoppers in Oxford Street just a few metres away.
Closing and opening coats and jumpers, joy and folly. Wafts of perfume gush into the air, hanging ready for noses. A ballet of zips and wallets. Arms linked into arms, synchronising their collars up against the wind . Pennies spilling out from pockets.

It is some time since I had seen Mr Rich Rainlore and yet there he was as though nothing had changed. Mr Rainlore had taken me under his wing many years ago, he is still going strong despite there being no new entries to his website Rainlore's World.

David Jones

Beethoven Paino Trio No.2 in G Op.1 No.2
(i) Adagio - Allegro vivace
Layers of pastry, fine filo. Mille feuille.
Indecision, neither one theme nor another. Robert Atchison's music is the beauty that flits through the party, moving from one face to another, never lingering long but always making an impression. Atchison chatters, to left, to the right, bubbling over.

AL.

Raga Garage - Carnatic strings

Jyotsna Srikanth

The Carnatic Strings are the sinuous threads that tug the heart like miniature campanological hands lurking in the rib cage. Untrue of course, Carnatic is the adjective denoting the main style of classical music in southern India, as distinct from the Hindustani music of the north. These internet pages have never strictly adhered to what is reality and fiction, but lets start with some facts.



Robert Atchison

Four piece Raga Garage performed to a crowd of Carnatic lovers at the Purcell Room on London's Southbank (21/07/2015) in a smear of colour and cascade like an autumnal Hyde Park on a windswept day. Orange, browns and reds aplenty but also that puce that lingers on chapped cheeks were the sentiments and the vision. There was a glistening varnish to the perspiring brows of Jyotsna Srikanth (Carnatic classical violin), Robert Atchison (western classical violin), Shadrach Solomon (piano) and NS Manjunath (percussion).

Robert Atchison is a familiar entry in the sketchbook of this blog, more often than not seated amongst the London Piano Trio, under the high ceiling of St John's Smith Square. Tonight he was the beauty and the glide, the swell, the fall, the wind and more often than not the pace of this quartet. His violin created the broad threads that Jyotsna Srikanth cut through, she pierced him, re-stitched in a complexity that was part mathematics and part patchwork.

NS Manjunath

The violins trod different paths, as you would expect from animals born in separate cultures but they ran together too. Atchison had a squirrelling verve while Srikanth's poetic themes uplifted the spirit and made you want to dash your new found zeal against her rocks.

Away from centre stage and the obvious spotlights was where the percussion of NS Manjunath awaited if you so dared to enter his layer. He laid the road for all three of his fellow musicians, although excitingly it was not all a pathway of granite slabs but tilted and bucked as though situated on the San Andreas fault. More than once he broke it apart and brought it back together again like a cultured navvy who is daydreaming of jigsaw pieces.

Shadrach Solomon

In the obsidian night lurked Shadrach Solomon who was barely visible, he laid his notes of discord, and they were snares for the heart. Once caught, my mouth filled thick with the violin of Jyotsna Srikanth, she was tempting me to choke my doubts away and drink in big cinematic gulps of sweeten air.

AL.

See Robert Atchison perform the Beethoven Cycle with the London Piano Trio during October, November (2015) and January (2016). Details below.

London Piano Trio - Music under Stalin

Robert Atchison - Violin

It was the strangest of days in London town last Sunday (09/11/2014). Middle-age soldiers in uniform walked the streets with sweethearts on their arms. Behind these, a second wave of wizened veterans brought up the rear, a little slower but still with chests puffed out. Poppies rested beside brightly coloured campaign strips as people swarmed away from the nearby Cenotaph.

Personal emotions, like many other around me, are confused during the red tinted days between Remembrance Sunday and the eleventh hour of the eleventh month. Just as confusing and enlightening was the sentiments stirred up by the London Piano Trio as they celebrated Music under Stalin. For this day marked the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. On the night of November 9, 1989, the most potent symbol of the Cold War division in Europe tumbled. Earlier that day, the communist authorities of the German Democratic Republic had announced the removal of travel restrictions to democratic West Berlin.

David Jones - Cello

The London Piano Trio of Robert Atchison (violin), Olga Dudnik (piano) and David Jones (cello) split the afternoon into two halves. The first belonged to Georgy Sviridov's stunning Piano Trio in A minor, Op.6. After the interval we were treated to Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E Minor, Op.67.

The first movement of Sviridov's masterpiece, quickly highlights Robert Atchison's versatility. With bow tapping on string he gives us a tip-toeing tension. It is a peck of a bird, a drip of a gutter and with the cello of David Jones joining too it has a sinister Hitchcockesque edge. You hear the folk influences of Sviridov's early tuition in the second movement, Sherzo. As you would imagine it was vigorous and playful but it also talked of power and strength. There was a sparse modernity during the third that built the tension once again between violin and cello. The pulse was so strong in the fourth, marked Idyll, you almost believed there was a drummer behind St John's mammoth pillars. It had an incredible vocabulary that left us hanging between the height of the strings and depths of Olga Dudnik's piano.

Olga Dudnik - piano

The second half of the day's concert was equally inspirational as cellist David Jones cast a gossamer trance over all of us who sat in St John's Smith Square. You felt the chill and the ethereal qualities of his playing. It was almost suffocating, such was his grip on our attention during the first movement of Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E Minor, Op.67. This was short lived and Robert Atchison was released like a sling shot on subsequent movements. The London Piano Trio gave us everything in this second set, from sprigs of humour to full bloodied devotion to the motherland.

The pounding of proud breasts wasn't the only sound we heard on this day of double meanings. Juxtaposed beside the poetic fantasies we also heard the strings of Atchison and Jones under pressure, notes of pain and tension tempered those of patriotic fervour.

AL.


ps. regular readers will know I started my apprenticeship under Rich Rainlore of Rainlore's World. I was lucky enough to see him at the concert and spend some time with him and his beautiful PA Chetna Kapacee. I hope this means a return to London's live music circuit. We all miss him.

London Piano Trio - Robert Caesar Atchison

Robert Atchison - violin

It is the third time I have sketched the London Piano Trio at St John's Smith Square, but my first opportunity (05/04/2014) to put words on paper. This is because I have spent the past 18 months happily serving my apprenticeship under the nurturing eye of critic Mr Rich Rainlore.

The venue is one of the most dramatic for a lowly artist like myself, who is more used to the low ceilinged burrows of the jazz world. The huge pillars that adorn the back of the stage dwarf the performers, and the long drape of the plush red curtains rain down behind the musicians, I always expect James Mason to stride in and herald the fall of the Roman Empire.

Our Caesar for the night is the London Piano Trio's violinist and leader Robert Atchison. A man with an infinite desire it seems to serve us a silver platter of violin/piano/cello themed nights, and I greedily gobble them up as he dangles his grapes into my mouth. Alongside Olga Dudnik and David Jones it was Atchison's turn to conquer the Czech musical culture with a foray of Suk, flanked by Smetana and a breaching finale of Dvorak.



Olga Dudnik (Piano) and the page-turner 

Within seconds of Suk's Trio in C Minor glistening diamonds of sweat dotted Robert Atchison's brow but it his stance that always catches my attention. Just like Caesar, Atchison sits in a confident and heroic pose upon the stage, or maybe even a tribal chieftain with his legs akimbo in an open display of fertility. The Andante was playful in his hands, like a childhood game that had been filmed on a cine camera by a enthusiastic uncle and slowed down to half-speed upon projection. The Vivace was a game of speed chess between 2 older gentlemen, their wooden pieced battle striking them alive. It ebbed from aggression to camaraderie. The piano gave us a lightness while Atchison's violin signalled the endgame, all 3 instruments dramatically  came together for the inevitable checkmate.

Smetana's Trio in G Minor saw my pen linger over the stoic beauty of Olga Dudnik, her deeply lashed eyes and rich red flash over the shoulder gave her the untouchable air of an empress. There was power here too and during the Moderato Assai you could feel the pathos, see the tremble in her chiffon petticoat as her head whipped back and she struck. Although the whole piece was poetic, even tragic in its themes there were several moment of frustration or comedy that caught my eye. Despite there being 3 performers on stage there is also the page-turner who must do his job too. Apologies for my ignorance in not knowing his name, I have seen his exemplary performance many times and never seen him falter, this was not one of those nights. Once or twice he missed the subtle nod of Olga Dudnik's head and I saw two pages get stuck together in a mad scramble of hands and blushes.



David Jones - Cello

In comparison not a bead of sweat or coloured cheek blemished David Jones' demeanour. Apart from the sweet music from his cello the only indicator of expression comes from his left eyebrow which wrinkles like the contours of the Lusatian Mountains. The Andante - Vivace non troppo during Dvorak's Trio in E Minor gave us a quick energetic Jones who cascaded into the laps of the audience beside me while Dudnik's piano danced around us. This was matched by the verve of Atchison in the final Lento maestoso - Vivace and supported by the rich folding waves of the cello once again.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Robert Atchison is already teasing us with another classical offering, this time a trip to the cinema. Join us as we celebrate three composers who successfully wrote music for both the concert hall and the screen. Starting with Sakamoto’s music to the movie ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’, then an exciting new commission by Christopher Gunning (most famous for writing the music for the hit series ‘Poirot’) and finally Korngold’s score to ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood'.

I can never remember whether the Roman emperor's appreciation was shown by a thumbs up or down in the Colosseum so I played safe and clapped as hard as I could.

AL.

The Stars of the Silver Screen by the London Piano Trio
5th July 2014 at St John's Smith Square
http://www.sjss.org.uk/events/london-piano-trio-0