The hype around the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival faculty concerts is justified as no other classical music festival in South Africa can boast quite such a line-up of internationally acclaimed artists. The programme is also varied and exciting with a number of South African premieres alongside audience favourites by Mendelssohn, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. However, […]
The Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival has always been a place where the old and the new meet. Whilst Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky remain staple fare, the likes of Gliere, Dohnanyi and Golijov, once foreign to our ears have, thanks to the bold programming of Artistic Director Nina Schumann, become known and even much anticipated […]
Despite severe budget cuts at our educational facilities and arts institutions over the last year or so, the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival is set to go ahead with its 15th annual festival. The programme will be bold (With one of South Africa’s most lauded concert pianists, Nina Schumann, at the helm, who would expect […]
Gareth Lubbe who had to miss this year’s edition of the SICMF contacted his friends on the SICMF faculty with the sad news that Denis Goldberg, who had been guest speaking in STOCKHOLM before going on to Germany in the week of the 2017 SICMF, was rushed to hospital. Doctors abroad had detected a ‘shadow’ […]
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 […]
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