High pianist house for a Chopin birthday deal with

Music author TONY MAGEE previews “Chopin’s Birthday Live performance” being performed in Canberra subsequent month.

AN excellent British-Australian pianist will probably be in Canberra quickly to current “Chopin’s Birthday Live performance” for the Buddies of Chopin Australia.

Penelope Thwaites will probably be joined by cellist Patrick Suthers and violinist Kirsten Williams in a live performance that includes “Piano Trio in B flat, K502”; Chopin’s “Ballade No 2 in F, Op.38”; a Thwaites fee and premiere efficiency, “Au Tombeau de Chopin” for piano trio and Chopin’s “Piano Trio in G minor, Op.8”. 

Thwaites is the daughter of poet, the late Michael Thwaites, who together with his spouse Honor, was a long-time resident of Canberra and a well known determine who performed a number one position within the Petrov Affair in 1954. 

Michael Thwaites’ poetry is stuffed with photographs impressed not solely by life in Australia as in “Canberra Autumn”, “Creation” and the pleasant “Metamorphosis”, but additionally in Britain as in “Coming into the Clyde” and his narration of a 1940 sea battle within the North Atlantic, “The Jervis Bay”.

His hymn “For Australia”, set to a tune by Henry Purcell was sung throughout an Anzac Day service in Westminster Abbey, in addition to on the Australia Day Bicentennial celebration on the Sydney Opera Home and when the late Queen Elizabeth II formally opened the brand new Parliament Home in Might, 1988.

“Each my dad and mom have been deeply musical,” Thwaites says. 

“As kids, we had excellent high quality music. They usually had a poetic quote for each state of affairs. I owe quite a bit to them. I believe what kids get from their dad and mom is extra what they do than what they are saying.”

Thwaites is a citizen of Australia and the UK and spends a substantial amount of her time in Canberra. Appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2001, she is a represented composer with the Australian Music Centre.

Often known as an intensely communicative live performance pianist and recording artist, she can also be a composer, author, editor, broadcaster (together with for the BBC) and music-festival curator. She has appeared as a recitalist in additional than 35 nations, and as soloist with main orchestras in Europe, Australia, and America.

Thwaites wrote a few of the first themes of her work, “Missa Brevis”, in Canberra.

“The Greek and Latin phrases have such energy and drive and I hope that individuals will suppose that they match,” she says.

“It’s fascinating to get the feel of the voices melding with the notes and phrases. The emotions have been expressed in these phrases perpetually and I regard it as a privilege to have set them to music.”

She can also be recognised as a global authority on the music of Percy Grainger and was creative director of London’s first worldwide Grainger occasion in 1998, additionally serving to to instigate the monumental 19-CD Grainger recording collection on Chandos, wherein she was a featured soloist. 

Violinist Kirsten Williams loved a global status earlier than becoming a member of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra in 2019 as concertmaster, additionally main the ANU’s Ladies in Music program in 2021.

Her music-for-healing ardour led to her recording two CDs for Australian Bush Flower Essences and, in 2014, she was named Volunteer of the Yr for her work enjoying within the Intensive Care Unit at Westmead Youngsters’s Hospital. In the identical yr, she grew to become patron of the Goulburn Strings Undertaking, designed to deliver music schooling to kids in low-socioeconomic, regional contexts.

Patrick Suthers, a graduate of the Canberra College of Music, is the principal cellist of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, a place he has held since 2012. He has carried out frequent chamber music concert events with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellowship Ensemble, together with personal performances for Pope Benedict XVI.

“Chopin’s Birthday Live performance”, All Saints Church, Ainslie, 3pm, February 19.