‘Night at the Museum’
Spitalfields Festival. Royal Academy of Music students
Geffrye Museum. 9 June 2015

In a nice collaboration between the Royal Academy of Music, the Geffrye Museum and Spitalfields Festival, RAM students gave mini-concerts in three different spaces of the museum, reflecting the museum’s history, the various historic rooms and contemporary music making, with all three events including a newly composed work. The student performers were Tabea Debus, recorders, Iosif Purits, accordion, and the Achille Trio. The three concerts were based on the period 1714, 1914 and 2014.

Tabea Debus played her own arrangement of extracts from Bach’s 2^nd and 5^th French Suites, followed by Alula, a new work by Cydonie Banting, written to contrast the tiny sopranino and the RAM’s rather curious looking new bass recorder. Transferring the Bach from the harpsichord to a single line instrument meant additional work for Tabea Debus in articulating the melodic line and the implied underlying pulse. She managed both very well, as with the sometimes tricky balance between volume and intonation. The new piece was a complex technical exercise for her, with flutter-tonguing, harmonics and having to switch between two diametrically opposed recorders. But her playing, and the piece itself, were both exemplary. Continue reading →