On Saturday 15th February 2025 at 7.30 pm, we will be performing in Cambridge one more time at the URC Downing Place: Anthony Howell - A Life in Poetry and Music.
Ralph and I will be joined by cellist Riccardo Pes to celebrate the multifaceted genius of Anthony Howell, a poet, novelist, dancer, and performance artist.
Anthony was born in 1945 and his first collection of poems called Inside the Castle was published in 1969. Since then, numerous other collections of poems, novels, and essays appeared - amongst the latest are Incomprehensible Lesson (versions of poems by Fawzi Karim); Consciousness (with Mutilation); Songs of Realisation; The Step is the Foot: Dance and its Relationship to Poetry; The Distance Measured in Days. Anthony is also a tango teacher (after being in his youth part of the Royal Ballet) and was the founder and director of The Theatre of Mistakes, which created notable performances worldwide in the seventies and eighties at venues such as the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Paula Cooper Gallery, the Tate, and the Haywood.
At the core of the concert program are the pieces based on Anthony Howell's poems composed by Michael Nyman, the popular composer of the soundtrack to the 1990 film The Piano, and Battista Pradal, my old composition teacher. Nyman wrote these songs as part of the cycle Body Parts for voice and piano in 2010, while Pradal composed his suite of pieces for the unusual tenor & cello duo in 2019. Pradal's songs were dedicated to Riccardo Pes and me, and we performed them in London and in Italy.
The rest of the program is also related to Howell's work: Field and Schumann had a key role in his exploration of the relationship between tango and classical music, while the songs by Vaughan Williams and German are based on poems by R. L. Stevenson and R. Kipling, who Anthony admires.
The concert will also include some of Anthony Howell's poems, read by the author himself.
Click here for more info and to reserve your seats!
Stay tuned, something else is also cooking and should be ready before Christmas... Don't forget to check out my Facebook and Instagram pages!