UFO Info Week-End

And it wasn’t like coming across the occasional isolated work by a woman composer – I was amazed at the

And it wasn’t like coming across the occasional, isolated work by a woman composer – I was amazed at the quantity of music that’s been composed by women.”So why do we seem to hear so little of it? “This goes back a long way. “It’s really my love of Mozart that started it all off,” she says. “I began to play his concertos while I was a student at Sheffield, and I always liked directing them from the piano, which was how Mozart used to do them. Then, after I’d graduated and I wanted to do this professionally, I realised that the only real way of making it happen was to have my own orchestra. It looked as if the last thing London needed was yet another orchestra, but we did have an agenda that was a bit different.”The Ambache Chamber Orchestra gave its first concert in 1984, and has since evolved into a regular presence on the scene, slimming down to the Ambache Chamber Ensemble as and when required by its choice of repertory In this, the music of women composers soon began to feature. It’s simply that, as she explains, someone had to do something about a genre of cultural censorship that for centuries allowed women to do certain things in public – sing, play and dance, for example – but not others. As Clara Schumann once wrote, “A woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, so why should I expect to?” And if a musician of her legendary talent felt browbeaten into effective self-censorship, what chance can other women composers have had?Ambache came to ponder these questions by an indirect route.

His Divertimento in B flat (K287) – whose busy violin part will keep the Ambache CO’s leader, Sophie Langdon, thoroughly occupied – was composed for the name-day of Countess Lodron, the sister of Mozart’s hated employer in Salzburg, Archbishop Colloredo (the music sounds as if Mozart liked her rather better). Also on the bill are the Concerto for string orchestra of 1948 by the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, and the Piano Concerto in B flat by Nanette von Schaden. (Nanette von who? More of her in a moment.)Ambache didn’t start out with the intention of mounting a crusade on behalf of women composers. Not that men are excluded from the annual three-concert series: they are allowed to have their music performed, just as they are allowed to play in the orchestra. But Tuesday’s concert is typical, in that there’s a female connection to each work on the programme.
Mozart wrote his Piano Concerto in G (K453) for a gifted pupil, Barbara von Ployer. A male writer has to be careful about putting ticks or crosses against such a statement: after all, there’s a sense in which, either way, it’s none of our business But the remark rings true. The tone struck by the Ambache Chamber Orchestra’s Women of Note series is, like Diana Ambache herself, serious without stridency, exploratory without tendentiousness.

It has also made a real contribution to concert-going life by bringing some attractive and forgotten music out of mothballs As it happens, much of it has been composed by women. There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Yeltsin, but plenty more not to vote for Zyuganov.”What not to say:”Sounds like they’d all better go on a big shopping spree, before the shortages start again.”. It is easier for them to ask their friends,” it told a forum of pollsters.”The risk of giving people freedom of political choice is that they might not exercise it wisely. The Russian Independent Institute of Sociology also pointed out that it is generally women who canvass opinion, and that “in many cases they are afraid some criminal or alcoholic will open the door. American political scientist Michael McFaul claimed that while he did not “dispute that the trend is in Yeltsin’s favour”, he believed the result would be “closer than predicted, in fact awfully close”. to strengthen and improve its nascent democracy,” warned the Independent, “we will all suffer the consequences”. Yeltsin has exploited the national media to such an extent that Zyuganov has been shut out, and has relieved the Central Bank of $1bn to meet the cost of his election promises Unsurprisingly, he is ahead in the polls.”If Russia fails…