Past Concerts 2011 to the present (click the year, below right, to navigate back from the most recent)

Acclaimed as one of the greatest interpreters of the Classical and Romantic repertories alive today, Portuguese pianist Maria-João Pires is an artist who combines exquisite stylistic refinement with a serious effort to plumb the intellectual complexities and spiritual depths of music. Refusing to conform to the traditional image of a concert virtuoso, Pires emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of music, always searching for hidden meanings which may elude the analytical performer. In her performances of Romantic masters, particularly Chopin and Schumann, Pires masterfully reconciles her passionate experience of the music with an admirable appreciation for the inner logic of the work she is interpreting. Reflecting her vast emotional range, her tone, as critics have observed, encompasses a dizzying variety of intensities, from an almost imperceptible lightness to an imposing monumentality, with a rich scale of intervening nuances.

Pires made her London debut in 1986, and has since performed with the major European and American orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. An enormously successful recording artist, Pires records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon, and among her many critically acclaimed discs are recordings of Chopin's Nocturnes, Schubert's Impromptus, Mozart concertos with Claudio Abbado, and Mozart's complete sonatas, which received the Grand Prix du Disque.

Born in Belgrade in 1985, Miloš Popovič studied at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad with Biljana Gorunović then at the Conservatoire Royal, Brussels, with Yevgeny Moguilevsky, a collaboration that lasted more than ten years. Since 2014 he has worked closely with Maria João Pires and subsequently became an integral member of Mme Pires’s Partitura Project. He has also performed at many festivals including the Menuhin Gstaad Festival, Schubertiades Porrentruy, Menton, and Radio-France Montpellie Festival. Miloš has also worked with numerous orchestras including the English Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, the McGill Chamber Orchestra and Antwerp’s deFilharmonie under conductors including Augustin Dumay, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Isaac Karabtchevsky, Boris Brott and François Deppe.

This concert forms part of the Partitura Project, a movement founded by a collective of artists, including Maria João Pires, who question their role and responsibility - be it æsthetic, ethical, social, pedagogical or spiritual - in a society where some of the most fundamental human values seem in crisis. It is the group’s aim to enable an open dialogue between different genres of art and science, and to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of humans in their environment.

Described by the New York Times as ‘the outstanding early-music ensemble’, Blue Heron is engaged in the exploration of vocal music of the Renaissance and Medieval periods and is now firmly established as the finest choral ensemble of its type in North America. Based in Boston, and led by Scott Metcalfe, Blue Heron offers a home subscription series in Harvard Square, and presents programmes in which original sources are used in the service of persuasive, vivid and exciting concert presentations. Its impressive catalogue of recordings offers a broad conspectus of Renaissance masterpieces, with many derived, in particular, from the great collection of Tudor church music surviving in manuscript in the collections of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and generally known as the ‘Peterhouse Part Books’.

Their concert for Camerata Musica Cambridge draws on this repertory, and offers one of its greatest masterpieces: the anonymous Mass, dating from the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, known as the Missa sine nomine ­–  a work that is the equal, in both beauty and sophistication, of anything by Byrd or Tallis.

‘A quartet for the new millennium if I ever heard one’, wrote a reviewer for Strad Magazine on hearing Cuarteto Casals for the first time, shortly after its inception in 1997 at the Escuela Reina Sofía in Madrid. Since its debut, Cuarteto Casals has been a repeated guest at the world’s most prestigious concert halls including Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, Musikverein Vienna, Philharmonie Cologne, Cité de la Musique Paris, Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Philharmonie in Berlin, among many others throughout Europe, North America and Japan.

The quartet has compiled a substantial discography with the Harmonia Mundi label, including to date eleven CDs, with repertoire ranging from lesser known Spanish composers Arriaga and Toldrá to Viennese classics Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Brahms, through to 20th Century greats Bartók, Kurtag and Ligeti. Since 2015 the quartet has been recording its first Beethoven CDs and has released a five-DVD set of the compelete Schubert quartets, recorded live at L’Auditori in Barcelona in 2013.

It has ‘a sonic signature entirely its own,’ enthused the New York Times, describing Cuarteto Casals’ distinctive range of expression. In recognition of Cuarteto Casals’ unique position as the first Spanish string quartet with a truly international profile, the quartet has been honoured with the Premio Nacional de Música as well as the Premi Ciutat Barcelona. The quartet has accompanied the King of Spain on diplomatic visits and often performed on the peerless collection of decorated Stradivarius instruments in the Royal Palace in Madrid. Cuarteto Casals often appears on television and radio throughout Europe and North America and is Quartet in Residence at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Cologne, and at the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona, where all four members reside.