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Welcome
to the website of Scottish conductor Mark Heron. Here you will find
concert information, biographies, reviews, photos and contact
information. As well as being a promotional tool for me, I hope you will
find that the site is a useful resource that contains some useful and
interesting information of general interest to conductors and other
musicians. Most of this is accessed through the
Teaching page.
News & Views
Lessons to learn from Olympic success
Congratulations to the British Olympic team on their superb performances
in Beijing. Normally a Guardian reader, I was moonlighting with the
Independent the other day and 2 articles caught my eye. In one, Paul
Newman
made the point that whilst there was more to it than just the cash,
the £2.6m annual budget for the UK's all-conquering track cycling team
enabled them to put a structure in place over the past 10 years which no
other country could match. In an
opinion piece, Steve Richards made the connection between Olympic
success and long term public spending, in the hope that this may be a
lesson for our politicians in terms of education and health funding.
Maybe also for the arts?
Stephen McNeff Recording
Stephen McNeff is Composer in the
House with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and a noted composer
of opera and theatre music. His opera Tarka the Otter, for mixed
cast of professionals and non-professionals, won the
2007 British Composer Award in the
stage works category. I recently recorded his major wind orchestra
pieces with the RNCM Wind Orchestra and the disc will be out later in the
year on the Campion label.
Below is a short film of some of the recording sessions, and an audio preview of the finished disc - Death be not proud, the 2nd movement of Stephen's Song Cycle Image in Stone, sung by the young Finnish mezzo Carolina Krogius. Incidentally, the players on this recording were all 1st & 2nd year undergraduates so the majority were 18 or 19 years old at the time of the recordings.
The audio levels are a little unequal so you might need to turn the volume down for the film and up for the audio track.
Nottingham Philharmonic Orchestra
My first season with the NPO attracted rave reviews:
"This orchestra is one of the
city's best kept secrets. Their skills, dedication and responsiveness to
young music director Mark Heron made Sibelius' Second Symphony a
thrilling experience.
"Stamina and all-round finesse were united in the Nottingham Phil's
gripping performance of Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony
(“Inextinguishable”). A folk-like woodwind movement offered respite from
various dramatic upheavals. The mood darkened for a mighty battle of two
timpanists, before the triumph of the radiant home key."
"The most substantial work was the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story. There aren't many pieces of music which pack more life-enhancing pizzazz into 20 minutes and the NPO, under its energetic and versatile conductor Mark Heron, gave such a fizzing, virtuosic account that the audience burst into applause before the conclusion."
"Anyone who has ever thought that Elgar’s 50-minute Violin Concerto was a tad too long should have been in the Minster to hear 21-year-old Chinese violinist Jiafeng Chen as soloist. This was a remarkable performance: not only technically brilliant but also subtle, deeply felt and astonishingly mature. Throughout the programme conductor Mark Heron’s imaginative vision was accompanied by precise attention to detail. In Weber’s Oberon overture and in Dvorak’s 7th Symphony phrases were beautifully shaped and shaded, dynamics subtly controlled and a firm sense of musical architecture maintained."
The 2008/9 seaon kicks off on Saturday 18th October with Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings and Shostakovich's monumental 7th Symphony "Leningrad". Ticket details.
David Oistrakh Festival, Parnu, Estonia
It was a pleasure to again conduct at this festival, and in
particular to work with the St Petersburg Festival Orchestra - a chamber
orchestra comprising players from the great professional orchestras
based in that city. Conducting the string orchestra arrangement of
Shostakovich's 8th Quartet, music which is in the blood of these
musicians, in concert was a real privelege.
Canford Summer School of Music
Canford is one of the great English summer music
traditions and offers a wealth of courses where professionals, students
and amateurs mingle in the beautiful setting of Sherborne School in
Dorset. This year we had a conducting class of 25 students from the UK,
Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Israel and Brazil.
Giya Kancheli and Georgia
A couple of years ago I was honoured to meet and work with the
great Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. At Canford we performed his
Magnum Ignotum for a small wind ensemble, contrabass and tape just
a day before the current hostilities began in that part of the world. I
hope things settle down there in the near future without further loss of
life. There is a great deal of Kancheli's extremely beautiful music
available on ITunes and similar sites.
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© Mark Heron. Last updated quite recently.