Star Travel Review

Music at Leisure

Music at Leisure has been one of our recommended partner companies.   For this latest Star Review we asked its Director Leonard Pearcey to tell us more of his plans. 

Leonard was Music Director of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama prior to establishing a successful career in writing and broadcasting, producing and presenting.   He lives in Bath (which he first fell in love with when working with Yehudi Menuhin on the International Music Festival, and where he is now President of the Bath Choral Society and a Board Member of Theatre Royal Bath) and the Mallorcan village of Deià (many of you will have heard his BBC readings of Gordon West's 1920s travel journal 'Jogging Round Majorca' through which he turned the paperback reprint into a modern bestseller now also available as an e-book).  

This is what he writes:
So, what is Music at Leisure (M@L) offering guests for the coming Season?

Well, we begin in North Wales at the stunning Quay Hotel, Deganwy, where the Suite we use for the concerts and dinners (and breakfasts here as well) has breathtaking views across the Estuary to Conwy Castle.   The musicians, making their M@L debut, are the renowned Tippett String Quartet, looking back on the Friday evening to Tippett influenced by Beethoven in turn influenced by Haydn.   Then on the Saturday morning they're joined by clarinettist Julian Bliss for Vaughan Williams and Bernard Hermann, whose centenary they're celebrating.   And that evening they link Hermann with his contemporary Korngold, his friend Richard Arnell and his admirer Miklós Rósza.   Those four had Hollywood in common, but these amazing pieces are all recital works.

We then start 2012 in the Queen Anne glories of Lainston House, set in 60 acres of glorious Hampshire parkland.   For this Sunday and Monday weekend M@L regulars The Schubert Ensemble link with Deganwy by beginning with Vaughan Williams' piano quintet; they end with the composer whose name they bear and his ever-popular Trout Quintet.   Here the morning event on the Monday features the hotel's falconer as we visit their newly built falconry in the Kitchen Garden and fly the Harris Hawks.

And that, with our 50th Season getting ever nearer, puts me in reflective mood as I recall some of our previous not-necessarily-musically-themed morning events: down The Big Pit from Abergavenny and up to the base of the spire at Salisbury Cathedral, touring the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon and the Holburne Museum in Bath, interviewing a piano tuner and his guide dog at Brandon Hall and the Classic FM Young Composer of the Year in Wimbledon, and one year Lainston's Head Chef giving us a tour of his kitchen and the next learning just what it means to be a Head Housekeeper.   Once we even had a cocktail-shaking morning: I thought I mixed a brilliant White Lady, and the guests who volunteered me agreed, but the instructing barmen judged it to have too much gin...

So, back to the present, or rather the future: where to next Season?   Well, returning to existing favourites of course, but I have exciting new possibilities to visit.

And who'll play for us?   Sadly one-time regulars like John Ogdon and Dame Moura Lympany are no longer with us.   But that keyboard master John Lill and Emma Johnson's clarinet still delight enormously, as does the Gould Piano Trio.   String Quartets such as the well established Alberni, Endellion and youthful Sacconi and pianists Noriko Ogawa and Piers Lane are firm favourites with our guests.   And the brilliant young Venetian Alessandro Taverna, whose remarkable piano playing so thrilled us on our recent first visit to The Quay, is due for a rapid return to Music at Leisure.

Full details on www.musicatleisure.co.uk of this wonderful way to enjoy music - at leisure.

Tippett Quartet	Lainston House Hotel, Winchester, Hampshire, United Kingdom	Schubert Ensemble
Quay Hotel & Spa, North Wales

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