Samling Institute for Young Artists is celebrating its 30th birthday, that is 30 years of supporting early-career singers and pianists and through its innovative Samling Academy that has transformed the landscape for classical singers growing up in North East England.
In celebration, on Friday 6 November there is a gala at Wigmore Hall when with alumni from Samling’s programmes and special guest Adrian Lester.
The concert illustrates the power of music to change lives, how composers and poets have harnessed the power of music to tell its own story. Music performed includes Franz Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock, (with guest clarinettist Eliott Berdugo), Antonín Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs, Robert Schumann’s Andersen Lieder and ends with one of the greatest love songs to art, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music in a special arrangement for eight solo voices.
Acting and a close attention to text are at the centre of Samling Institute’s teaching ethos and every programme includes a stage actor on the leadership team. Earlier this year, actor Adrian Lester, star of the RSC’s recent Cyrano de Bergerac, joined the Samling Artist Programme as a coach. Threading together the programme at Wigmore Hall, he will read poems by writers including Andrew Marvell, Walter de la Mare, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy.
The performers will include British soprano Nardus Williams, Portuguese mezzo-soprano Cláudia Ribas, Scottish tenor Euan McDonald, Swiss baritone Felix Gygli, American pianist Jonathan Ware, British pianist Alfred Fardell, and four recent members of Samling Academy, soprano Tia Radix-Callixte, mezzo- soprano Lauren Bagge, tenor Benedict Munden and baritone Fabian Tindale Geere.
Full details from the Samling website.
