Paul Jackson

Song Recital
2023-09-22 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | St Leonard’s Church, Hythe, Kent
A lunchtime concert of folk-inspired music sung by Marina Karagianni, and accompanied by Paul Jackson. Music by Ravel, Obradors, Lavilla, Montsalvatge,and Constantinidis.

Programme

Fernando Obradors – Canciones clásicas españolasFélix Lavilla – Quatro canciones VascasXavier Montsalvatge – Cançó amorosa, Cinco canciones negrasMaurice Ravel – Cinq mélodies populaires grecquesIoannis Constantinidis – Three Greek folksongsHabaneras de la Costa Brava – El Abanico

Music of the Ether
2023-09-20 19:30 - 21:30 | St Matthew’s Church, 27A The Drive, Kingsley, NN1 4RY, United Kingdom
Charlie Draper and Paul Jackson present an evening of music for the earliest electronic musical instruments, the theremin, and the ondes Martenot. The concert includes well-known music by Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff and Gershwin, together with original music written for the instruments, accompanied by film. The performance will be interspersed with explanations and demonstrations of these fascinating instruments.

Programme

Camille Saint-Saëns – ‘The Swan’ from Carnival of the AnimalsSergei Rachmaninoff – VocalisePierre Vellones – Fantaisie for ondes Martenot and pianoJoseph Schillinger – Mouvement Électrique et PathétiqueDarius Milhaud – Suite for ondes Martenot and pianoGeorge Gershwin – ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and BessOlivier Messiaen – ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ from Turangalîla-SymphonieRichard Rodney Bennett – Serenade No. 2Miklós Rózsa – Spellbound Concerto

Free Music Machine: Third Sundays Focus Tour
2023-09-17 14:00 - 16:00 | Percy Grainger Home and Studio, 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York, 10601, United States
We invite you to register for our next Third Sunday tour of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio, September 17, 2023 at 2 pm EDT. The Third Sundays program is an outreach initiative, led by volunteers, and designed to welcome diverse groups through focused, thematic tours. We are pleased to announce that Percy Grainger Society President, Dr. Paul Jackson, will be leading the September tour, offering a closer look at Grainger’s approach to and work on Free Music. The presentation will be centred around the newly-conserved Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders machine, one of only two only remaining examples of Grainger’s Free Music machines. This event is free and open to the public, but due to space limitations, registration is encouraged.

Book Launch: Till Life Become Fire
2023-09-15 22:00 - 23:00 | Virtual via Zoom
Join Teresa R. Balough in conversation with PGS President, Paul Jackson, at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio, for the launch of her new biography.

What goes into the making of a creative genius and how can their gifts be used to help uplift humankind? These were questions that led the Australian/American pianist, composer, and music educator Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) to exhaustively document his life, his thoughts, and his associations and establish in the country of his birth a museum dedicated to helping answer those questions. Grainger was a creative genius who thought more in terms of the future than of the present and was an advocate for the role that music can play in creating a more harmonious and loving future for humankind. This book is the first attempt to bring together in one volume the details of Grainger’s life as they relate to his music using his own words and those of the people who knew him. It makes use of many heretofore unpublished documents and musical examples and is written in such a way as to be accessible to all while also offering a detailed study of his musical works.

The Life and Work of Percy Aldridge Grainger: Till Life Become Fire is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Tone Rhythm Pitch: Exploring Percy Grainger's Free Music
2023-09-14 17:00 - 19:00 | Percy Grainger Home and Studio, 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York, 10601, United States
Drawing its inspiration from the sounds of nature, and free from the constraints of conventional rhythm and individual pitch, Grainger’s lifetime passion was free music. From an early age, he imagined music that would glide continuously across the pitch spectrum, without the need for metrical rhythms and, ultimately, without the need for a performer; the composers’ ideas would be translated directly into sound.

Elements of Free Music can be found in much of Grainger’s instrumental and vocal compositions, where the use of sliding notes and irregular rhythms often feature. Between 1935 and 1937, Grainger wrote three short pieces – Free Music No. 1, Free Music No. 2 and Beatless Music – which further demonstrated his ideas in practice. Grainger regarded all of his music up to this point as merely a stepping-stone to the full development of Free Music, and he was to increasingly devote his time to this from the late 1940s onwards. Using his White Plains home as a studio, he worked alongside his wife, Ella, and in close collaboration with a young physicist, William Burnett Cross, to design and built machines that were able to produce Free Music without the involvement of a human performer.

Most of the machines, given Graingeresque names such as the Side-Ridge Clothes-Line-&-Scotch-Tape-Tin Oscillator-Player, or the Kangaroo-Pouch Method of Synchronising & Playing 8 Oscillators, were constructed from wood, paper, cardboard, string, and other found objects scavenged from the house, local hardware stores and the immediate locale. The machines were in a constant state of flux and were often dismantled or repurposed as soon as sounds were recorded. The final machine, the Electric Eye, remained unfinished at the time of Grainger’s death, but was the most sophisticated and was able to produce seamless electronic pitch glides. It is this machine that places Grainger’s experiments in electronic music squarely alongside other experimental composers.

Saffron Opera Group: Der Rosenkavalier
2023-09-10 14:30 - 19:00 | Saffron Hall, Audley End Road, Saffron Walden, Essex, CB11 4UH
A concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier by Saffron Opera Group, conducted by Michael Thorne.

Haslingfield Choir: Love Songs
2023-07-01 18:00 - 19:30 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir performs Brahms’s Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder Waltzes.
Conductor – Paul Jackson
Piano Duet – Maurice Hodges and Thanea Hodges
Soprano – Anna-Luise WagnerAlto – Ute Lepetit-ClareTenor – Simon Macarenhas-CarterBass – Alistair Bamford
Speaker – Dale Savage

Vltava: English and French Piano Music
2023-06-10 21:00 - 22:00 | MS Elbe Princesse, Vltava, Czech Republic
Programme

Percy Aldridge Grainger: Blithe Bells, Knight and Shepherd’s Daughter, The Merry King

Cyril Scott: Lotus Land

Francis Poulenc: Novelette in C major

Claude Debussy: ‘Bruyères’, from Préludes, book II, Deux Arabesques, Clair de Lune

Vltava: Pictures of Bohemia
2023-06-07 21:00 - 22:00 | MS Elbe Princesse, Vltava, Czech Republic
Programme

Antonín Dvořák: ‘Serenade’, ‘Tittle-Tattle’, ‘At the Hero’s Grave’, and ‘On the Holy Mount’ from Poetic Tone Pictures, op. 85

Bedřich Smetana: ‘Friendly Landscape’, from Sketches, op. 5, no. 3

Bohuslav Martinů: ‘Columbine Dances’, from Puppets, book I

Leoš Janáček: ‘The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away’, from On an Overgrown Path

Miloslav Kabeláč: Preludio ostinato

Peter Eben: Bells Before the Lights Go Out

Mifune Tsuji Trio
2023-05-31 13:00 - 14:00 | Downing Place URC, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EL
Mifune Tsuji and Paul Jackson, from the Mifune Tsuji Trio, perform music for violin, and piano, including JS Bach’s Sonata in A major, BWV 1015, Nimrod Borenstein’s Quasi una cadenza for solo violin, Michio Miyagi’s Haro No Umi, Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango, and the traditional Japanese song Karatachi-no-hana.

Threads: Music for Voice and Piano
2023-04-29 19:30 - 21:30 | Lauderdale House, Highgate Hill, Waterlow Park, London, N6 5HG
David Ryan has curated this evening featuring performances of his recent works for voice and piano together with two pieces by the American composer Terry Jennings.

The ‘threads’ of the title refers to the interconnection of poetic texts, from contemporary author Martha Kapos, to Richard Brautigan, Walt Whitman, all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman epigrams, resulting in the songs themselves being an interweaving through these different temporalities and approaches to sound. It also refers to the inclusion of two piano pieces by Terry Jennings. Jennings is the least known of the minimalist innovators of the 1960s, but he was an important and influential part of the La Monte Young/Yoko Ono scene of the early 1960s; his music remains seldom performed and unpublished, although it has a hypnotic and tranquil beauty. Significant works by Jennings will be featured in each half of the concert, Winter Sun (1965) and Winter Trees (1966). Ryan has commented, “I see Jennings’ music as a thread, even if from a very different perspective, connecting with my own approach to sound and space in composition, and so brings here an archival connection to this current project”.

Cristina Grifone has performed with leading ensembles including the Nuova Orchestra Alessandro Scarlatti, Musica Fiorita Ensemble and Orchestra, and Antonio Florio’s I Turchini, for many concerts. She has also been involved, in parallel, with contemporary music. Recordings have featured her singing Handel, Veneziano, Cimarosa, Perti, and Porpora for Glossa, Pan Classics, and Brilliant Classics labels.

Paul Jackson is a pianist, conductor, musicologist and lecturer, based in Cambridge, UK. He has performed many modern and contemporary works including concertos by Stravinsky, Bartok and orchestral works by Berio. An authority on the music of the Australian composer, Percy Grainger, he is Editor of The Grainger Journal and President of the Percy Grainger Society, based in New York.

David Ryan is a visual artist as well as improvising musician. Although mainly autodidact as a composer, he received some lessons from jazz musician Don Rendell. Recent compositions include Aphorisms 1-3, (2019 – 22) Fields and Refrains (2021) and Inscriptions (2021–2022) which has been recently performed at Ljubljana City Museum, Slovenia and Schrattenbach Opera, Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Music of the Ether
2023-03-28 18:00 - 19:00 | Hughes Hall, Cambridge, CB1 2EW
Charlie Draper and Paul Jackson present a programme of music with film, played on the earliest electronic musical instruments, the theremin and the ondes Martenot, with piano accompaniment.

Programme includes:

Pierre Vellones: Fantaisie

Joseph Schillinger: Mouvement Électrique et Pathétique

Darius Milhaud: Suite for ondes Martenot and piano

Riccard Valente: Complaint

Olivier Messiaen: ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ from Turangalîla-Symphonie

Richard Rodney Bennett: Serenade No. 2

Miklós Rózsa: Spellbound Concerto

Music of the Ether
2023-03-27 18:00 - 19:00 | Music Recital Hall, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge, CB1 1PT

Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra: Jommelli Requiem
2023-03-25 19:30 - 21:30 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Paul Jackson, perform Niccolò Jommelli’s beautiful Requiem (Missa pro defunctis), and Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and the Serenata in G major, K. 525, ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’.

Saffron Opera Group: Don Giovanni
2023-02-19 14:30 - 18:00 | Saffron Hall, Audley End Road, Saffron Walden, CB11 4UH
Saffron Opera Group, conducted by Mike Thorne, present a concert performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Mozart’s outrageous farce tells the tale of an incorrigible young playboy who blazes a path to his own destruction in a single day.

Based on the story of Don Juan, Don Giovanni follows an irresistible (yet irresponsible and amoral) youth who is loved by women almost as universally as he loves them.

Mifune Tsuji Trio: LCMLive
2023-01-23 16:00 - 17:00 | London College of Music, St Mary's Rd, London, W5 5RF
The Mifune Tsuji Trio perform music for violin, saxophone and piano, including Simone Spagnolo’s Non ho dormito questa notte mai, Bartók’s Baladă și joc for two violins, and new pieces by composition students at the London College of Music.

The Newtown Ensemble: Bartók's 3rd Piano Concerto
2023-01-14 19:00 - 21:30 | Stockbridge Parish Church, 7b Saxe Coburg Street, Edinburgh, EH3 5BN, United Kingdom
Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is performed by Paul Jackson, with the Newtown Ensemble, conducted by Michael Thorne.
Programme:
Stravinsky – Symphony in C
Bartók – Piano Concerto No. 3
Sibelius – Symphony No. 3

New Palace Opera: Albert Herring
2022-12-04 19:00 - 22:00 | St John’s Church, Waterloo, London, SE1 8TY
A concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera, Albert Herring, given by New Palace Opera, conducted by Mike Thorne.

Haslingfield Choir: Acis and Galatea
2022-12-03 19:30 - 21:30 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Paul Jackson, perform Handel’s popular pastoral opera Acis and Galatea.
Acis – Richard Symons
Galatea – Anna-Luise Wagner
Damon – Simon Macarenhas-Carter
Polyphemus – Oscar Simms
Tickets: £12, (£6 students, children free), available from TicketSource

St Augustine's Singers: Toward the Unknown Region
2022-11-12 18:00 - 19:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
Paul Jackson conducts the St Augustine’s Singers in a concert of choral music featuring Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs and Toward the Unknown Region, and the world premiere of Simone Spagnolo’s Nothing but dust.
