After the festivities of the previous evening, the second day of our residency began with Matt Gee bravely volunteering to lead the 8am group warm-up class. Rather unsurprisingly for such an early morning session, the attendance of Septura’s other members – which had been enthusiastically mooted some twelve hours earlier – failed to materialise, as […]
Today our long awaited residency in Nelson begins. Over the next four days we’ll give a performance of our Pilfered Piano programme, coach various young chamber groups, conduct a concert of Gabrieli in the Cathedral and combine together with the students in the final concert in a big Strauss finale. After doing our individual daily […]
We celebrated Easter Sunday with the first rehearsal of our New Zealand tour, at the Centre of Musical Arts in Nelson. To be honest it was a bit of relief to feel slightly human again, and for our lips to have returned to a more normally responsive state. Brass instruments are fairly unique in that […]
The 6th volume in our Naxos series is a homecoming: music by English composers of the 20th century. This is what the press have had to say about it: Cox and Knight display exquisite sensitivity to the originals; they ought to make a pretty penny moonlighting as professional arrangers and film score orchestrators. How these […]
The story begins at London Heathrow’s Terminal 3, with a typical touring check-in of 6:20am. Given previous touring mishaps, the simple fact that we still had flights booked made it one of our more successful starts to a tour. Not really knowing how cold Spain would be in December, most people came wrapped up for […]
An early Sunday call at a particularly rainy London Euston station sees Septura assemble to perform for the first time since our Kleptomania spree of concerts concluded in July. It feels like it’s been a particularly long break for us, considering how 2018 has been Septura’s busiest to date, performing dozens of dramatically different programmes around […]
Our 2017-18 season came to an end with the final performance of our Kleptomania series at St John’s Smith Square, London. It’s been a fantastic season for Septura, full of firsts – our first US and Germany tours, first visits to lots of fantastic UK venues and festivals, and of course, our first concert series, performed […]
The Altmark Festival was Septura’s first German destination of 2018, and we met early on Saturday morning to polish up our Borrowed Baroque programme. We have performed this a number of times in the UK recently, and merely had to bring James Fountain up to speed on our newest piece, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. After working our way […]
We’re delighted to be making our debut at the wonderful Proms at St Jude’s in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London on 27 June. St Jude’s is an iconic building well-known to all of the members of the group, because London orchestras and chamber ensembles often record there. I know the church even better than the others […]
New nationwide YouGov research, widely reported in the British press, has revealed that 62% of British adults want to broaden their musical horizons, and classical chamber music is the genre that tops the list. The YouGov poll revealed that almost a quarter of Britons want to discover more about classical music – more than any […]