At this year's Festival Showcase, there will be pre-concert talks before Kate Dixon's piano recital on Thursday evening, and before the song recital on Friday evening.
On Thursday 20 November, at 6.30 pm in the Bar at Square Chapel Centre for the Arts, the composer Anthony Gilbert talks about his recently completed Third Piano Sonata which will be receiving only its second performance in Kate's recital. This is a chance to hear at first hand what motivates a composer to write a new piece, to understand some of the compositional processes involved and to learn about the interaction between composer and performer when the piece is finished.
On Friday 21 November, again at 6.30 pm in the Bar at Square Chapel, Professor Douglas Jarman will be talking about Hugo Wolf's set of songs ("forty-six miniature masterpieces") which together make up the Italian Songbook and exploring why Wolf, one of the great song-writers of the nineteenth century, is so rarely performed on the concert platform.
These pre-concert talks are free and are aimed first and foremost at the interested lay-person rather than the person with specialist musical knowledge. As such, they are an ideal opportunity to learn about works that are seldom heard in the standard concert repertoire.