David Owen Norris
Welcome to my website.
I began the year listening to the first edits of several recent recordings:
- Jane Austen’s music collection, on an 1817 Broadwood signed by the composer J.B. Cramer, with Amanda Pitt and John Lofthouse. Most of the pieces come from nine volumes that have only just come to light: this is the first time they have been recorded. It’s a particularly Austen-focussed project, since Broadwood is the only make of piano mentioned by Jane Austen, and J.B. Cramer the only composer. The one title of a piece of music mentioned in the novels is Robin Adair, in Emma, and so we present the first-ever recording of the version Jane Austen knew, a set of variations by Kiallmark. Jane Fairfax must have been quite a pianist!
- Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, on Gustav Holst’s 1850 Collard & Collard. This is another recording full of Firsts: it’s the first recording to incorporate my discoveries about Mendelssohn’s notation and his unique musical syntax – hailed as important discoveries when I presented them to a meeting of the Royal Philharmonic Society; the first recording of the extra bars of music from the early English Editions of the Songs without Words; and the first recording of Holst’s piano.
- Benjamin Britten’s Scots settings (on a modern Steinway) with Mark Wilde
- Mid-nineteenth-century arrangements of Beethoven for viola, on an 1865 Blumel, with Paul Silverthorne
I’m also listening to dozens of versions of Debussy’s Clair de lune for Radio 3’s Building a Library on 20th February.
Don’t miss my radio-opera Pugwash walks the plank at the Lighthouse Arts Centre in Poole on February 11th! Email me for details. If you’ve already missed it, put July 11th in your diary, when the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus will give the third performance of my oratorio Prayerbook, in St. Peter’s Church, Bournemouth.
