In conversation with Stephane Crayton and Richard Gowers
Join us in the Studio at 2pm on Sunday 6th April.
Stephane has recently completed work on a new critical edition of Handel’s sonata for violin and harpsichord, HWV 371, based on the autograph manuscript in the British Library. In this educational performance Stephane and Richard will explore Handel’s compositional and notational practice, examine its impact on their approach to its performance, and present the sonata in its entirety alongside another of Handel’s works for violin and harpsichord.
Stephane Crayton
Stephane's research essentially concerns musical meaning—how is it possible that music can move us? He focuses on conceptions of order: their codification, and relation to their cultural, notational, and embodied histories.
Alongside Rachel Stroud and Zephyr Brüggen in 2016 he founded rites, a musical and theatrical collective that questions and challenges rituals and conventions of the concert hall. A recent project, 3 Dreams, a weaving together of recitations of Dante with lecture and music, based on work he produced during his PhD, has toured the Italy and the UK numerous times.
Richard Gowers
Richard Gowers is Principal Conductor of the London Handel Orchestra and Choir of the 21st Century, and Director of Music at St George's Hanover Square, Handel’s church in London.
His critically-acclaimed recording of Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur was named a Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’, described in the magazine as “tremendously focused and intensely cerebral playing…[conveying] the fundamental musicality of the work”. He has frequently appeared live on BBC Radio 3, as well as on Radio 4, Classic FM, and BBC Television.
