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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
Busy Week
One of the great things about conducting as a career is that no
two weeks are ever the same. Sometimes, though, things get a little
hectic. The following are the pieces I'm doing this week either in
rehearsal, concert or recording:
Brahms - Symphony No.4; Verdi - Overture La Forza del Destino; Strauss - Overture Die Fledermaus; Grieg - Piano Concerto; Adam Gorb - Awayday; Peter Meechan - Crazy Diamonds Shining; Philip Wilby - Catcher of Shadows; Beethoven - Symphony No.9; Schubert - Mass in G; Adam Gorb - Battle Symphony; Adam Gorb - Suite for Winds; David Onac - From Different Places.
And that's not even including supervising student conductors in rehearsals of Wagner - Overture Tannhauser; Mahler - Songs of a Wayfarer; Britten - Sinfonietta; Maxwell Davies - Farewell, a fancye.
Better get back to the studying....
RNCM Wind Weekend
The
new, enlarged RNCM Wind Weekend was a great success with a wide range of
performances, master classes and clinics. Pretty busy weekend for me
with 4 different performances in 2 days but it was a pleasure to work on
contemporary wind music by Gorb, McNeff and an RNCM student, Mark
Francis, a classic from earlier in the 20th Century by the Greek
composer Nikos Skalkottas, and Mozart's Gran Partita. In the
days following the festival we recorded a disc of Adam Gorb's extremely
brilliant and utterly difficult wind pieces, including Towards
Nirvana and the more recent Farewell. Watch out for the cd
on the NMC label in the Spring.
RNCM Conducting Weekend
The
dates for the next RNCM Conducting Weekend are 30th April to 2nd May
2010. Joining Clark Rundell and I on the faculty will be Philippe Bach,
a former Junior Fellow at the College and now having a very successful
career in the opera world in Germany. Details of the course, and an
application form, are available
here. This course is extremely popular and fills up very quickly so
early application is advised. The weekend covers a wide variety of genre: symphony,
chamber & wind orchestras, opera scenes and new music ensembles.
Experienced conductors looking for some refresher training, young
conductors interested in full time study, and those working in music
education or with amateur groups are all welcome to attend
Spanish Wind Conductors Congress
Just
back from Spain where I was invited to conduct and speak at the above
event. The traditions and history of wind playing in the Valencia region
of Spain are known and respected all over the world and it was a great
honour to be invited to work with one of the bands from that part of the
country. As they are approaching their 175th anniversary it was slightly
daunting to learn that I was the first non-Spaniard to conduct the
Centro
Instructivo Musical Apollo band from Alcoi! We played a programme of
English music: Vaughan Williams, Woolfenden, Gorb & Hesketh. And yes,
the weather was lovely and a welcome change from Manchester in November.
Manchester University Symphony Orchestra
Congratulations
to the members of MUSO for fantastic concerts in Sofia and Plovdiv,
Bulgaria. Manchester University has always had an extremely strong
academic music deparment with a world class composition faculty.
Things are going from strength to strength on the performance side at the moment with tremendous collaboration between the faculty and the student music society. This coming season will see a revamp of the way the orchestras and ensembles are operated and details of an exciting series of concerts can be found on the MUMS website.
At the university I work with an auditioned group of 6 student
conductors, all of whom get significant experience with symphony,
chamber, string, wind and brass orchestras and ensembles, making it one
of the leading options for those interested in serious conducting study
at undergraduate level.
Canford Summer School of Music
Just back from the 2009 Canford course. 22 conductors
from all over the world, a great wind orchestra of students and very
fine non-professional players, 4 performances, 91 gigabytes of video,
umpteen pieces of repertoire and goodness only knows how many beers.
One of the unique things about this course is the mixture of students: orchestral and wind band conductors, some already very experienced, others less so, with a wide variety of backgrounds and ages from many parts of the world.
The dates for the 2010 course are 8th to 15th August. Details will be available on the school's website and on this site.
Cincinnati
Earlier this summer I spent just over a week in Cincinnati with
the RNCM Wind Orchestra performing at the WASBE conference. You can read
my tour blog
here. Our programme was entirely of British music written (with
the exception of a short Vaughan Williams starter) since 1979. In
chronological order of composition: Edward Gregson, Adam Gorb, Edwin
Roxburgh, David Horne, Michael Oliva, Gary Carpenter. We also give a
repertoire concert which included pieces by current and former RNCM
composition students Duncan Ward, Emily Howard and Gavin Higgins.
CDs of both concerts are now available from Mark Custom. Browse to the "Order Forms" and select WASBE 2009.
Recent
Reviews
"The Nottingham Philharmonic has long been one of the
country's finest amateur orchestras but since the appointment of rising
Scottish conductor, Mark Heron, they consistently deliver performances
on a par with the region's professional outfits."
"Gustav Mahler said that nature was all around him, and all he had to do was compose it. Never have I heard his musical impressions of nature reproduced so eloquently than in a memorable performance of Mahler's First Symphony under Mark Heron's incisive guidance."
CD Review: Stephen McNeff: Image in Stone
"This CD, then, is recommended to
anyone interested in uncommon wind band music—in fact, to anyone
attracted by deeply felt, slightly quirky, highly individual
contemporary music. As one would expect given the provenance, the
youthful wind ensemble—mostly players 18 to19 years old—performs
beautifully."
Full review from Fanfare magazine
here.
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© Mark Heron. Last updated quite recently.