Clarinettist Robert Plane and violist Rachel Roberts perform with the Tippett Quartet at the London Soundtrack Festival this week in a concert featuring the Bernard Herrman Clarinet Quintet and Christopher Gunning’s String Quartet.
This annual festival celebrates the music of television, film and games, and presents leading artists performing in venues that are of particular significance to the repertoire. Taking place over the course of four days this month, the festival presents a variety of events, from concerts and masterclasses to screenings and panel discussions with some of the industry’s foremost creatives.
Robert Plane joins the Tippett Quartet to perform the festival’s opening concert, in which Rachel Roberts stands in for the quartet’s regular violist. Plane and Roberts regularly collaborate as members of Ensemble 360 and Trio Meister Raro, and are delighted to join the award-winning Tippett Quartet for this performance.
The programme is dedicated to concert works by two renowned film composers, Bernard Herrmann, whose film scores included Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, Psycho and Jason and the Argonauts, and Christopher Gunning, whose musical legacy was the inspiration for the creation of the festival. The concert opens with Herrmann’s Clarinet Quintet, ‘Souvenirs de Voyage’, composed in 1965 and dedicated to Norma Shepherd, who went on to become the composer’s third wife, followed by Christopher Gunning’s String Quartet (1997).
Speaking on BBC Radio 3’s Saturday Morning programme in a segment about the festival, Shepherd painted a portrait of a composer whose creative practice and extraordinary musicianship extended far beyond the scores for which he is best known. The episode also features the quartet’s cellist Bozidar Vukotic speaking about the quintet, and it can be heard here, starting at 2:06:22.
The concert takes place at 1:00pm on Thursday 9th April at St Giles’ Cripplegate in central London, where Herrmann’s score for Brian de Palma’s Obsession was recorded. For further details and tickets, please click here.
