By day nine the SICMF is really peaking. Apart from guest ensemble lunch hour concerts earlier during the festival, there were two sessions of Student Ensemble Concerts (11 and 12) on Saturday, at 13:00 and 17:00 respectively. Both of them, timewise, seemed to never end because every group wanted to show off their best side, […]

Over time many music historians observed specific trends amongst the composers of symphonic music – even when they were not necessarily or specifically writing symphonies per se. With three different programmes filling three orchestral concerts this weekend, plus a fourth presented at Khayelitsha at noon on Sunday which will partly be a repeat of Saturday […]

Four orchestras with slightly different identities, six soloists, four composers, three conductors, two South African premières and a capacity audience brimming over with merriment filled the Endler Hall for the Faculty Concert 7 on Thursday night. The repertoire – two contrasting Romantic works by Frenchman Camille Saint-Saëns and his German contemporary Max Bruch, plus a […]

Day six out of ten arrived. While experiencing and continuing to celebrate a constant overactive exuberance at the 2017 SICMF, it provided us with a fascinating Faculty Concert in which listeners could involve themselves and even be submerged into the fascinating process of dissecting and contrasting two representatives of a full-blown mid-European Romanticism, and their […]

Part of any festival, like the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival you are attending now, should have certain rules in their constitution, or at least the kind of unrestrained driving force behind their right of existence, which will guarantee that the commission and promotion of new work is an essential right. Festivals the world over […]

If names like Orban, Schoenfield, Bowen, Basegmezler, Bernofsky, Liebermann, Bruce, Fokkens, Blanc, Cui, Babin, Bogár, Dancla, Sitt, Premru, Zivkovic, Gurlit, Kapustin, Van Anrooij, and dozens of others would appear overnight on the labels of tinned or glass packed food in supermarkets, no one would buy them the next morning. There would be pandemonium. “Where has […]

Since storytelling is such a vast canvas from which composers often source and find their inspiration, including early times long before the terminology “programme music” became a musical catchword without boundaries in the 19th century, blogger PAUL BOEKKOOI thought of sharing a timeless anonymous story created with the help of his thumb. It somehow connects […]

The starting blocks of the 2017 Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival are already well beyond us in this, the 14th edition of an annual event. It is here where music education, performance and listening are the core dynamics – keeping hundreds of us for a period of ten days fully engrossed in this, the most […]