St Mary’s Church, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5EB. Doors open 2.30pm. Refreshments.
Our good friend Val Welbanks returns to Hay Music, on this occasion as a member of one of the UK's foremost mixed chamber ensembles, the Marsyas Trio. Appearing with them is the internationally acclaimed Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. Their programme includes the world premiere of a major work by British composer Michael Finnissy and a work by Dame Judith Weir who was Master of the Queen’s/King’s Music from 2014 to 2024. Both composers will be present at the concert and they will join the players for a pre-concert conversation. This is a unique event and one not to be missed!
Tickets: £20 (under 25s £10)
Please note: we are offering a limited number of free tickets to under 25s on a first-come-first-served basis.
Tickets are also available from the Hay Tourist Bureau and at the door if still available
Programme
Pre-concert conversation with Michael Finnissy and Judith Weir
Judith Weir: Nuits d’Afrique
Michael Finnissy: Wisdom (world premiere)
Mel Bonis: Scènes de la forȇt
Camille Saint-Saëns: Une flûte invisible
Maurice Ravel: La flûte enchantée (Shéhérazade)
Maurice Ravel: Chansons madécasses
The London-based Marsyas Trio, formed of graduates of the Royal Academy of Music - Australian flautist Helen Vidovich, Canadian cellist Valerie Welbanks and Belarusian pianist Olga Stezhko - is one of the UK's foremost mixed chamber ensembles.
The Trio has been championing the vast body of historic repertoire for flute, cello and piano and continues to develop this genre through commissioning and recording projects, offering audiences a fascinating perspective on gender, societal and political themes.
Recent concert highlights include performances at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge Festival, Conway Hall, Leeds Summer Festival, Britten-Pears Arts in Aldeburgh and a Northern tour, taking in two full-house concerts at Skipton Town Hall and the King’s Hall in Ilkley. The 2024/25 season takes the Trio across the UK, including the Three Choirs Festival, Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds and Hay-on-Wye, where they will be joined by the eminent composers Michael Finnissy and Dame Judith Weir.
Their latest album ‘Alternative Readings’ featuring music by Michael Finnissy was released on the Métier | Divine Art Recordings in March 2024, in collaboration with award-winning mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. The CD received rave reviews and was selected as the Chamber Choice by the BBC Music Magazine in a 5-star review.
The Marsyas Trio are the current Artist By-Fellows at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and FUAM Ensemble in Residence at the University of Leeds.
Lotte Betts-Dean is an Australian mezzo soprano based in the UK with a wide-ranging repertoire and a passion for curation, programming and collaborative project development. Praised for her “irrepressible sense of drama and unmissable, urgent musicality” (The Guardian) and “arrestingly opulent voice” (Gramophone), Lotte is equally at home in chamber music, art song, contemporary repertoire of all kinds, early music, opera and narration.
Lotte is an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, an Ambassador for Donne UK - an organization supporting women in music - and she won Young Artist of the Year at the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. Lotte is a regular at major festivals and venues across the UK, Australia and Europe, including Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Aldeburgh Festival, Oxford Song, West Cork Chamber Music and Australian Festival of Chamber Music, and operatic credits in baroque, 20th century and contemporary opera include Grand Théâtre de Genève, Bayerische Staatsoper and State Opera of South Australia.
Lotte is a Young Artist alumnus of Britten Pears Arts (2022) City Music Foundation (2019) and Oxford Lieder (2020). She has recorded for Naxos, Divine Art Métier, Another Timbre, Platoon, BIS and Tall Poppies, among others, as well as multiple albums for Delphian Records. Lotte studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, as well as completing a Fellowship at Australian National Academy of Music.
Michael Finnissy was born in the London Borough of Lambeth in March 1946. He was self-taught until 18, listening to Antony Hopkins Talking about Music on the radio on Sunday afternoons, and visiting libraries. He was awarded a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Bernard Stevens and Humphrey Searle, and piano with Edwin Benbow and Ian Lake. He then studied in Italy with Roman Vlad.
He played for classes and taught Music at the London School of Contemporary Dance, and then at Chelsea School of Art, Winchester College and Dartington Summer School. He was also musician in residence to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and to the City of Caulfield in Australia. He has worked with the East London Late Starters’ Orchestra, and CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) since their inception in the mid-1980s. As a recitalist he still features many new British works, and has given more than 300 first performances, he has also been a member of Music Projects (London) and Circle, directed the new-music groups Suoraan and Exposé, and conducted and recorded with Andrew Toovey's ensemble Ixion.
In 1990 Finnissy was appointed President of the International Society for Contemporary Music, re-elected in 1993 and made an honorary member of the ISCM in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed Senior Fellow of the KBC ‘chair in New Music’ at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and later that year was made Professor of Composition at the University of Southampton, where he is now an Emeritus Professor.
Finnissy has been featured composer at the Huddersfield, Bath, and Almeida Festivals in the UK, at Harvard’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus, at the Sydney Mardi Gras, at Spectrum (New York), at the Summer Institute of Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) in the New England Conservatory (Boston), ‘Time of Music’ in Finland, the Borealis Festival in Bergen (Norway) and at ‘Finnissy Weekends’ in Maastricht and for the BMIC Cutting Edge.
He has written three evening-length stage-works for small forces: Undivine Comedy (for two singers, actor and ensemble), Thérèse Raquin (for four singers and piano), and Mankind (for baritone, five actors, five musicians and small chorus), a large number of songs and solo instrumental works, choral music, music for string quartet, piano trio and piano quartet, five piano concertos and five ‘epic’ cycles for solo piano: Verdi Transcriptions, Gershwin Arrangements, Folklore, The History of Photography in Sound and the four-volume Klavierübung.
Judith Weir is a British composer, born in Cambridge, England to Scottish parents in 1954. During her schooldays she had a few composition lessons with John Tavener and then studied music at Cambridge University, where her supervisor was Robin Holloway. After three years working as a community artist in rural southern England (with Southern Arts) she taught for some years at Glasgow University and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and later directed Spitalfields Festival in London's East End. She was resident composer with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with the orchestra's then director, Simon Rattle, and more recently has been Associate Composer to the BBC Singers.
From 2014-2024 she held the historic royal post of Master of the Queen's (from 2022, King's) Music, the first woman to do so in 400 years. The role involved writing music for many national occasions, including the State Funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II and the Coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla. She has also taken the opportunity to champion school and community music, writing music for learner ensembles and the UK's many choirs and amateur orchestras.