by April Fredrick | Aug 2, 2017 | News & Ideas
Since May, I have been involved in an extraordinary project: Monk and Lotus, a new opera mingling Western and Chinese opera and physical theatre. Below is a little taster of the result: Whole-Body Singing: Shiru’s Wang’s Quest Mapping the Petals of the Lotus...
by April Fredrick | Apr 25, 2017 | News & Ideas, Uncategorized
Four Drums and One Stage On Sunday, I went to an improvisation gig by a jazz quartet at a venue in East London. Five minutes in, I was thinking that I should have read the blip more carefully, though a second reading confirmed my initial reaction, which was entirely...
by April Fredrick | Apr 6, 2017 | News & Ideas
Today was a bit of a triumph, a laying to rest of old ghosts. For the first time in my memory, I went for a run (3 miles, if you wish to know details), and actually enjoyed it—all of it. No doubt it helped that it was a mild spring evening, that I was running around...
by April Fredrick | Mar 31, 2017 | News & Ideas
Tuesday was a day of contrasts not as great as they initially appeared. First that evening, I went to hear David Suchet read the entire Gospel of Mark in St Paul’s Cathedral. Several things struck me. First, the way that it brought out so vividly the original...
by April Fredrick | Feb 27, 2017 | News & Ideas
‘For we shall be hereafter as though we had never been’. Cheery thoughts from Solomon, he of the Ecclesiastes quote, ‘Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!’ One could imagine that in a song-cycle with a title such as Songs of Loss and Regret, these...
by April Fredrick | Oct 27, 2016 | News & Ideas
‘Music, when soft voices die…vibrates in the memory’ (Percy Shelley) Two days after the recording and premiere of Jane Eyre with David Stout, Mark Milhofer, Gwion Thomas, Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra, these lines by Shelley capture my sensations,...
