{"id":2381,"date":"2018-05-21T16:29:40","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T16:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/?p=2381"},"modified":"2018-05-26T16:05:18","modified_gmt":"2018-05-26T16:05:18","slug":"behind-the-scenes-with-david-owen-norris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/2018\/05\/21\/behind-the-scenes-with-david-owen-norris\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the scenes with David Owen Norris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Southampton’s head of classical performance, pianist Professor David Owen Norris, has a summer full of projects. Here he gives us a look at his preparations for recording, performance and broadcasting in the coming months:<\/em><\/p>\n

Jupiter Project<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m juggling Broadwood grand pianos at present, working out how to get my own 1828 instrument into Askrigg church for a concert in the Swaledale Festival, and then get Christopher Barlow\u2019s ingenious re-make of the instrument \u2013 with an original action but brand-new frame and wrest-plank \u2013 into Cooper Hall near Frome, to record for Hyperion. It\u2019s always a question of how many steps: up or down: and how wide? The picture below gives you just how big Broadwoods are. In Bremen once I had to press-gang passers-by into carrying my Broadwood up three flights of stairs, and once a doorway at Holkham Hall was only a quarter of an inch wider than the piano, so these days I plan my piano moves with military precision. The concert and recordings are part of the Jupiter Project, based around Professor Mark Everist\u2019s book Mozart\u2019s Ghosts. There are more concerts later in the year, and a film.<\/p>\n

Head over to the Jupiter page<\/a> for the project demo with Caroline Balding (violin), Katy Bircher (flute), Andrew Skidmore (cello) and David (on his 1828 Broadwood): Mozart\u2019s C major Concerto K.467 arranged by Cramer, and his Jupiter Symphony arranged by Clementi.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Copland Unwrapped<\/strong>
\nRobin Browning\u2019s new Southampton orchestra, the S\u00f3n Project, has created an Unwrapped format where I go through a piece in the first half, with musical examples from the band, and then we perform it in the second half. We started by Unwrapping Sibelius, then Elgar, and last autumn we Unwrapped Tchaikovsky\u2019s Fifth Symphony. Yesterday it was Aaron Copland\u2019s Appalachian Spring. It\u2019s interesting how hard Copland strove to be truly American. The more I read his writings, the more I wonder whether the creators of the music he used as models had the same obsessions. Do blue-grass guitarists try to be American, or do they just happen to be surrounded by Kentucky? Perhaps it\u2019s just \u2018high art\u2019 that wants to be national. Saul Bellow wanted to write the Great American Novel. Batman just gets on with saving the world.<\/p>\n

Find out more about the Unwrapped series on the S\u00f3n project page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Chord of the Week<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m working on my sixth series of this unlikely component of BBC 2\u2019s PromsExtra<\/a>. The Proms team sends me a list of all the pieces that are going to be televised, and I sift through them, hunting for chords. I need just one each week. Sometimes a week\u2019s televised Proms throw up half a dozen chords, and sometimes there seem to be none at all at first. Both situations are equally frustrating. They need to be chords that tell a story, or throw an unusual light on a piece. And they need to lend themselves to a two-minute explanation at the piano. Having explained some three dozen chords already, the pieces are starting to come round again: Mahler Five, for instance, or the Emperor Concerto. But some pieces are full of meat \u2013 I shall reveal a hitherto unsuspected aspect of Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age in my second chordal visit to The Planets. Though The Planets could probably fill the whole series on its own!<\/p>\n

Check out one of David’s chords from 2017 <\/a>– <\/em>from Elgar’s Second Symphony.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Southampton’s head of classical performance, pianist Professor David Owen Norris, has a summer full of projects. Here he gives us a look at his preparations for recording, performance and broadcasting in the coming months: Jupiter Project I\u2019m juggling Broadwood grand pianos at present, working out how to get my own 1828 instrument into Askrigg church for a concert in the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6494,622892,207,66718],"tags":[611778],"class_list":["post-2381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-classical","category-performance","category-staff","tag-david-owen-norris","column","threecol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3YgXZ-Cp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2388,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions\/2388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}