Tag Archives: Elena Urioste

Lammermuir: Kaleidoscope Collective

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Dirleton Kirk, East Lothian

The Lammermuir Festival has a fine track record of bringing musicians together in interesting combinations to explore new repertoire. When it invites the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the group arrives with much of that work already done.

The regular cellist with Kaleidoscope, Laura van der Heijden, is the festival’s artist in residence this year and she will appear with other groups of friends and as a soloist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia before it ends. She began the commitment more gently, as a member of the ensemble founded by pianist Tom Poster and his violinist partner Elena Orioste.

Poster is a pianist of formidable relaxed skill who wears his musical erudition lightly, but the second of Kaleidoscope’s recitals at Dirleton Kirk demonstrated his special programming ability.

It was designed to showcase the virtuoso flute playing of Adam Walker, and thus immediately suggested a focus on French music of the last century, where and when composers were especially attracted to writing for the instrument.

Of the four works featuring Walker, however, only the Poulenc Flute Sonata was at all familiar, and few if any of the capacity audience would have known the earlier pieces played.

Intriguingly, they each teamed the flautist and piano with one of the string players, beginning with Urioste in the Suite en trio by Mel Bonis. Another triptych, the Trois femmes de Legende, has already brought the almost forgotten Bonis to Scottish attention, with both the RSNO and BBC SSO playing the orchestrated piano pieces recently, and this chamber work was similarly finely-wrought. A salon conversation with the listening violin responding to the flute’s lead, the work becomes more muscular in the closing Scherzo, driven by the keyboard.

Philippe Gaubert is also little remembered as a composer, although he was a well-known flautist and conductor in the early part of the 20th century. His Three Aquarelles, with cello completing the trio, are not especially pictorial but explore the full ranges of all three instruments and the dynamic possibilities of their combination in elegant style. Where  the Bonis began with a Serenade, the Gaubert closed with one, but it was the central slower section, with solos for cello, flute and piano in sequence, that was the most beguiling.

Maurice Durufle is not known as a composer of chamber music because he didn’t write much of it, and the Prelude, Recitatif et Variations from 1928 is the only piece he published. Quite different in structure from the music that preceded it, this was the composer looking back to early music from a modernist perspective, if one far from as experimental as some of his contemporaries. With violist Vicki Powell as the string addition, the unfolding of those Variations developed with building intensity, making for a powerful conclusion to the first half of the concert.

The Poulenc, it hardly needs saying, was brilliantly played by Walker and Poster. This is core repertoire for a virtuoso flautist and this one barely looked at his score in a performance of technical and expressive virtuosity. The attack he achieves on the instrument and the fluidity of his fingering is a class apart, and Poster’s rippling keyboard skills and considered dynamic control made for a perfect partnership.

The programme concluded without Walker, with Faure’s Piano Quartet No 1, a beautifully-shaped early work that followed on from the works that Poster and the strings had played on Friday evening.

If this was young Faure expressing his broken heart after being jilted by Marianne Viardot, that melancholy is most eloquently expressed in the cello-led Adagio. The Scherzo that precedes it was particularly enticing, with bright pizzicato strings and sparkling keyboard playing.

As the growing number of Kaleidoscope fans had surely hoped, Poster revealed one of his bespoke arrangements for all five musicians by way of a unique encore. If Henry Mancini’s Moon River might appear to have little relationship with the rest of the programme, Urioste pointed out the composer was a flute and piano player who honed his arranging skills with the US Air Force Band, serving in France in the Second World War.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Laura van der Heijden

Chamber music’s full spectrum

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The pianist at the heart of Lammermuir-resident ensemble, Kaleidoscope, tells KEITH BRUCE about the music festival audiences can look forward to

Tom Poster sounded remarkably relaxed when we spoke less than a fortnight ahead of the Lammermuir residency of Kaleidoscope, the chamber collective he leads with his violinist wife Elena Urioste. The couple’s summer schedule, I suggest, does look to have been non-stop.

“That’s true,” the pianist concedes. “Elena and I just got back from a month in the States. We were in Santa Barbara and Seattle, and then in Maryland where Elena has a small festival. Then we made our Proms debut with Kaleidoscope in Truro, and now we are about to go off to France for a week with the Elias String Quartet before preparing for Lammermuir.”

A glance at his website confirms the suspicion that playing chamber music with a constantly-evolving list of different ensembles and collaborative partners means learning a huge amount of different music. Poster says that, in fact, he has eased up a bit.

“One of the changes I’ve made since becoming a parent two years ago is that I am slightly more thoughtful about not overloading myself with repertoire. There’s so much music I love that I used to try to say ‘yes’ to as much as I could, but with a two-year-old it is hard to learn quite as many notes.

“But Festivals, for pianists especially, do tend to involve a large number of notes!”

Besides playing, of course, there is also the business of keeping Kaleidoscope on the road, with 10 players making up the team staying in East Lothian.

“We have a lovely administrator who works with us on a freelance basis, otherwise I think I’d go completely mad,” says Poster, “but Elena and I do end up doing an enormous amount ourselves, partly because the repertoire and the musicians involved are so intertwined.

“We have a flexible line-up, with a slightly different group of musicians for each concert, depending on repertoire or who is around and available. We are both very passionate about the art of programming, as well as the selfish pleasure of gathering together some of our favourite musicians to play in new and different combinations.

“The Lammermuir group has a lot of our regular players: Elena and myself, Rosie Ventris (viola), Laura van der Heijden (cello), Savitri Grier (violin) – all the string team for Lammermuir are very much core players. But every one we’re bringing is an integral part of the team.”

Lammermuir audiences can also look forward to core Kaleidoscope in the music that team is playing.

“We are very lucky that James Waters and Hugh Macdonald are such wonderful and generous festival directors. They gave us free rein and that enabled us to put together what I think is a trademark Kaleidoscope programme.

“There are some justly celebrated works, like the Schubert Octet, alongside a number of pieces that we really just feel deserve to be heard far more and which we are really confident that audiences will love when they hear them, even if they haven’t heard them before.”

Monday’s opening recital includes a work that Kaleidoscope can take credit for helping down that road to familiarity.

“The Coleridge-Taylor nonet is a student piece that he wrote when he was 18 at the Royal College of Music. I came across it because we are always looking for pieces that involve as many of us as possible.

“After the pandemic, when concert halls were just beginning to re-open, John Gilhooley asked us to programme a concert at Wigmore Hall. There’s not all that much for strings, winds and piano – and selfishly I wanted to be part of the recital.

“We all fell in love with it, and recorded it for Chandos on a whole Coleridge-Taylor disc last year. It has become a real signature piece. It is such an inventive work, where he is flexing his musical muscles. It has a young man’s exuberance, trying to find as many combinations of the nine instruments as possible. It has immediate appeal and always seems to go down well with audiences.”

Other works that Kaleidoscope are bringing to East Lothian are being championed by Poster’s group in the same way.

“I can’t understand why the Reynaldo Hahn Piano Quintet is a piece that is not played all over the place. Anyone who loves the chamber music of Faure will adore it – it is one of the most sumptuous pieces of chamber music I know. Singers know his songs, but his chamber music is just as wonderful.

“And the Korngold Suite is a piece that does get played occasionally but the unusual combination of instruments means it doesn’t get heard enough. It’s a piano quartet with two violins and cello, but the pianist is only using left hand because it was written for Paul Wittgenstein.

“Elena has loved the piece for years and persuaded me to practise my left hand skills! It has so many influences, from Bach to Viennese waltz, with this sort of golden shimmer. There’s this amazing slow movement that is just so touching.

“Another thing we are really excited about is the world premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s new piece which Ben Goldscheider has commissioned – a trio for horn, violin and cello. I haven’t heard that yet so I can’t talk in detail about the music, but it’s always a special thing to be bringing new music. I have seen a bit of the score and it looks immediately appealing with wonderful textures from the three instruments.”

New music is something that Poster sees as integral to the development of Kaleidoscope in the future.

“I do a lot of arranging for the group, which is a side passion of mine. Clarinettist Mark Simpson regularly plays with us and is also a wonderful composer. He is going to write something for us and we have various other plans in the pipeline.”

The group’s fourth disc for Chandos is coming out this month. Entitled Transfigured, it has Schoenberg as its centrepiece alongside three other works from the Viennese early 20th century period, that Poster says deserve to be heard far more: Zemlinsky for soprano and string sextet, Alma Mahler songs which he has arranged for soprano and string sextet, and a Webern Piano Quintet, an early Romantic work by the composer.

Another side of Urioste and Poster’s musical life will also have an outing as a Coffee Concert on Wednesday morning in Haddington. The couple’s Juke Box videos-from-home, with Poster’s duo arrangements of light classical, pop and rock tunes became a phenomenon during the Covid pandemic.

“The success of the lockdown Juke Box project has been the biggest surprise of our musical lives so far,” says Poster. “When we originally dreamed it up it was just to keep ourselves amused, and we thought maybe our mums might watch it. But it happened to fill a need for what people were looking for at the time. Obviously we didn’t expect lockdown to go on so long, but then it has had an afterlife as a recording that has won awards, and as a live programme it is a lot of fun.

“We try to incorporate the element of public choice that was the original impetus behind it, by giving the audience a chance to vote for what they want to hear.”

It is another facet of this pianist’s enormous range of activity, often, but not always, in partnership with Urioste.

“I do still play concertos – I’m at the Royal Albert Hall for Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Philharmonia at the end of the month, and I’ve Grieg and Rachmaninov coming up later in the season. But concertos are really just large-scale chamber music. The collaborative aspect of music-making is where I find most joy and fulfilment. I still play some solo recitals – a few each season – but chamber music is the thing I’ve found keeps me inspired with its musical companionship bringing people together.”

Kaleidoscope plays the Lammermuir Festival on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Elena Urioste and Tom Poster programme their Juke Box on Wednesday.

BBC SSO / Urioste / Poster

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City Halls, Glasgow

There has been no point in the past century or two of musical history at which an orchestral concerto with more than one soloist was anything other than a poor career move for a composer, given the obvious extra requirement for performances. Precocious talent though he was, that difficulty may not have occurred to the 14-year-old Felix Mendelssohn when he wrote his Concerto for Violin and Piano in D Minor in 1823. First performed with his violin teacher and the young composer at the piano, it was unpublished in his lifetime and a definitive edition only appeared in the last year of the 20th century.

Nonetheless, it had its UK premiere in 1968, in a Glasgow studio concert by the BBC Scottish, which would have been a good reason for performing it this spring at the City Halls, although it was not the one here. Instead, the work, which requires virtuoso turns from the soloists, was the culmination of a programme created by life and musical partners Elena Urioste and Tom Poster, whose relationship began as members of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.

More recently the couple have been one of the sensations of the “at home” online projects with their Lockdown Jukebox of varied repertoire. That imagination was very much in evidence here, in a 20th and 21st century sequence that preceded the Mendelssohn, beginning with a duet before works that teamed them individually with the SSO strings. Throughout there was a sense of chamber music intimacy that made the concert something of an extension of those broadcasts from home.

For mysterious reasons, between its recording on March 25 and its broadcast, the BBC had changed the title of the recital from Dreamscapes, the name of the work Urioste would play, to Spiegel im Spiegel, the more familiar Arvo Part composition that opened it. Poster claimed a hypnotic state was part of the method of playing the Part, but that can only be true if the concentration for its minimalist rising and falling measures is second nature.

The Gerald Finzi Eclogue for Piano and Strings that followed may be no stretch for a pianist of Poster’s ability, but its pastoral Englishness is the setting of many a dream idyll, with unmistakeable similarity to Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.

Dreamscapes itself is a decade-old composition for violin and strings by Clarice Assad, daughter of Brazilian guitarist Sergio, that has its own echo of The Lark at the start. Urioste gave the New York premiere of the work three years ago to the day of this broadcast. After some rhythmically Latin scoring, the work becomes much more edgy about two thirds of the way through its 12 minutes. By some distance a less soothing dream, its turbulence resolves into a more gentle awakening, rather than being suggestive of nightmare.

Urioste and Poster were joined by orchestra leader Laura Samuel for a post-Mendelssohn encore composed by Donald Grant of the Elias Quartet in what was a beautifully-curated programme. A refreshing change from conductor-led thinking, and a relationship that the orchestra would do well to nurture.

Keith Bruce