Baroque! From Bernini to Bow Bells.

Hello Reader!

After a short absence I am back! I am afraid it has been a while since my last post, I have recently started a new traineeship with the very exciting City of London Festival and have been very busy of late, so have sadly had little time to tend to my blogging needs. However I am very happy in my new post. I have spent the last few weeks learning lots of things about how the festival is organised and part of that has included visiting lots of STUNNING churches in the City of London, which are used as venues for many of the classical concerts in the festival's programme. 

This has been complete heaven for me.

 Two of my most favourite things ever ever are live classical music [see blog post 2!] and ARCHITECTURE, and so to be able to spend mornings, or afternoons walking around the square mile, round corners and down tiny passageways and roads of the main thoroughfares to suddenly be confronted by great spires, peeking between two office blocks, or eatery chains, is just wonderful. In so many cases, if you didn't know the church was there, you would miss it, as a considerable amount are hidden from the outside, but from the inside are stunning. One that really had a strong impact on me was St Mary at Hill [another aspect I love about these churches is their crazy names- St Andrew by the Wardrobe is my favourite mad name so far!]. I am not going to try and explain why, I think I will just show you, and give you the location so you can googlemap this baby and check it out for yourself!

Another thing I am really enjoying about being a part of the festival is that, by helping out at our Free Winter Concerts, I get to watch them! I feel so lucky to get to spend one lunch-break every week listening to live music, from a wide variety of composers and genres. So far I have heard a Beethoven Piano recital, Jazz singers and the City of London Sinfonia performing works by British composers including Walton, Purcell and Finzi. I KNOW I've already banged on about how much I love live music, but seriously these concerts are GREAT. They are free, in architectural gems, and the music is really wonderful.
For a different way to spend your lunch break and to see what's coming up soon,  click HERE to see the rest of the free winter concert programme. It's a really good taster of what's to come in the summer and it is making me SUPER excited for the Festival to start!

Now enough about what I've been up to job-wise.

As I've been a bit behind with writing posts, and there is quite a lot I have wanted to write about, I thought I would try something different in this weeks post. As I don't have time to write a full blog post for each item (especially judging by how many words I usually end up dedicating to one topic... whoops!) I am going to try out brief summaries, or, "What I'm up to", and perhaps pick one to focus in on a little bit more. Let me know what you think. If we like it, maybe it'll stick.

What I'm Listening to: Finzi: In Years Defaced, Prelude, and Romance for String Orchestra. [Recording by the City of London Sinfonia under Richard Hickox on the Chandos label]. The Prelude was one of the pieces performed in the lunchtime concert last Wednesday by the City of London Sinfonia, and it reminded me of how much I love Finzi. Finzi's Five Bagatelles [in particular the 4th and 5th] were some of the very few pieces I actually enjoyed playing for my final Clarinet exams as I felt they had character and were playful and jolly, not merely exercises for showing off fingerwork or virtuosic scalic passages *cough cough* yes, I'm looking at you Mozart Clarinet Concerto. In short, they were fun, not just hard-work  This CD shows Finzi's more romantic side and, although it is quite gushy, I think is charming, and for me conjures up images of pastoral idyllicism. A very English composer indeed. 

What I'm reading: I started reading The Borgias by Christopher Hibbert, but I'm afraid I can't say I enjoyed it very much, so I stopped reading it. I don't tend to get on very well with history books, or historic fiction that feels a bit like  it's just one thing after the other in a sort of "this-man-did-this-and-then-this-man-did-this-and-this-man-didn't-like-this-man-so-he-did-this". Notice the focus on man. History is often far too male dominated for my liking, and this book was very much from the male perspective. Now I'm getting back into music, I have started reading Why Music Moves Us by Jeanette Bicknell. It's an academic study, looking into how past civilisations and philosophers have treated the link between music and the emotions, and how it effects our behaviour and why. Should be interesting, I hope!


What I'm Watching: Baroque! From St Peter to St Paul's. I LOVE Waldemar Januszczak. I think his programmes are BRILLIANT and this is no exception! It charts the rise of the Baroque from its origins in the Catholic Counter Reformation (taking me back to the paper I studied in final year on Bernini and Borromini) and of course ROME, throughout Europe, to Britain, where he sees it manifest in none other than the fabulous City churches of Wren and Hawksmoor that I was gushing about at the beginning of this post. How apt! It is still sitting on I-player, but not for much longer so I URGE you to watch it. And if I haven't convinced you yet, here are some snaps of FABULOUS Baroque things that I took when I went to Rome myself...

The ceiling of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane by Francesco Borromini

The Ecstasy of St Theresa by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria 

The ceiling of Sant'Ignazio by Andrea Pozzo

What I'm visiting: In the last few weeks I've been lucky enough to see both the Light Show at the Hayward and Barocci at the National Gallery. I hope to write separate posts dedicated to each of these, but we'll see.

What have you been up to?

Hope you've enjoyed this post. Let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading again,

Jennifer