Becoming a member is easy…

• Apply online — saving £5 on most rates when you pay by Direct Debit
• Download the application form — and pop it in the post
• Call the box office — on 0844 576 7977

Great offers…

• Enter our draw to win
• Take advantage of great savings

Join our Membership Scheme this week, and not only will we rush you your advance brochure in time for members’ priority booking (9–15 August), you’ll save 20% on your choice of fifteen events, have the chance to attend two exclusive members’ events and enter a draw to win a fabulous basket of traditional French patisserie & conserves from Bonne Maman.

Great offers for members

All this, plus great savings at Cheltenham’s premier bars, hotels and restaurants, and advance news, priority booking and savings at 2011’s Jazz, Science and Music Festivals.

The Cheltenham Jazz Festival performance from Kit Downes Trio featured on Jazz on 3 last night…
listen again right here (for seven days)

…and CONGRATULATIONS on their nomination for a Mercury Music Prize.

As well as extensive notes on the music performed at this year’s festival it contains artist and composer biographies as well as musical journalism of the very highest quality, all written by renowned musicologists, journalists and commentators such as Stephen Johnson, Christopher Cooke, Andrew Stewart, Professor Ray Tallis and more — plus Festival Director Meurig Bowen.

Look inside…sample pages

Features include

• An ‘unquiet mind’ — a reflection on Schumann in this anniversary year.
• A portrait of Brett Dean, insight into composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo, and profile of Norwegian legend Ole Bull.
• The background to Michael Zev Gordon’s new work Allelle.
• Professor Raymond Tallis on ‘music, the mind and the brain’.

The 2010 Festival book is now available by post for just £5 including post and packing. UK addresses only. Allow up to 28 days for delivery.

How to order

1. Send a check payable to Cheltenham Festivals for £5 (this includes postage)
2. Send to Music Festival programme book offer, Cheltenham Festivals, 109 Bath Road, Cheltenham, GL53 7LS
3. Include your name and postal address on the back of your cheque
4. We will post out as soon as possible, but please allow up to 28 days for delivery

We came across this fascinating local project…

‘As I Walked Out’…an eight week epic journey with four donkeys, chickens, carts, children, young people and of course artists walking across the six districts of Gloucestershire.

“…in each district a commissioned artist will work with community groups delivering inspirational arts initiatives inspired by the walking, the landscape, the views and the outside environment…”

more on their website | daily news on their blog

Art workshops will be at Postlip Hall, Winchcombe this weekend, 17/18 July.

Classical pianist James Rhodes, famed for his prodigious talent and rock star attitude, performed a sell-out recital of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. Following rapturous applause he opted for a Chopin prelude as his final encore. James didn’t have his sheet music to hand, so instead turned to his new tablet computer, found an app with the Chopin score, and played from this. To turn the page, all he had to do was tap the screen.

Find out more about James at www.jamesrhodespianist.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brahms, Schumann and Clara Schummann, Wednesday 14 July, listen again

Four Seasons and a Souvenir, Tuesday 13 July, listen again

With the ever increasing interest in ‘early music’ throughout the 20th century, Carlo Gesualdo — Prince of Venosa, mid-way between Naples and Bari — has been a source of fascination for many. Part of that interest, for sure, is Gesualdo’s status as music history’s most notorious double murderer; his wife, Maria d’Avolos and her lover Don Fabrizio Carafa were caught in flagrante by Gesualdo, and suffered gruesome deaths on the night of 26 October 1590, their many-times stabbed corpses left out in the street. But musicians have been even more drawn to the consequence of that crime of passion — a compositional output, late in life, ridden with guilt and remorse (so the story goes), and exhibiting in the chromatic harmony an outrageous daring that was well ahead of its time.

The 18th century writer Charles Burney, ahead of his own time in an appreciation of renaissance-period repertoire, was not a fan: Gesualdo’s music was characterised by ‘harsh, crude and licentious modulation…extremely shocking and disgusting to the ear.’ But in more recent times, Gesualdo has been regarded by some as modernism’s outrider from an earlier age. Peter Warlock’s alter-ego Philip Heseltine co-wrote a Gesualdo biography in 1926. Stravinsky marked the 400th anniversary of his birth in 1960 with three madrigal ‘re-compositions’ for orchestra, the Monumentum pro Gesualdo. Frank Zappa was a fan. And just two years before Brett Dean wrote his own Gesualdo piece in 1997 (Festival Academy 1, M24), a Schnittke opera, Gesualdo, appeared alongside one of music-cinema’s most bizarre (but tremendously intriguing) biopics, Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices by the German master film-maker Werner Herzog.

Over 45 years and in as many films, Herzog has tended to be drawn to extreme situations. Three of his five legendary collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, for example, took in the stories of Büchner’s Woyzeck, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Nosferatu) and an attempt to establish both a rubber plantation and an opera house in the Peruvian jungle (Fitzcarraldo). He has made films about a plane crash survivor, tribes in the Sahara desert and extreme mountaineering in the Pakistani Himalaya. And most recently, in 2005, Herzog made a documentary on Timothy Treadwell, a man-gone-wild whose apparently close, benign relationship with grizzly bears ended with him being savaged and eaten by one.

So it is perhaps not surprising that in 1995, Herzog made a documentary for German television on Carlo Gesualdo, a composer he clearly found compelling for the extreme characteristics of both his music and his life. Herzog’s work reveals strong and eclectic responses to music. Several soundtracks to his films were provided by the Krautrock/ethnic-psychadelic group Popol Vuh. The Nashville Sound guitarist Chet Atkins and Beethoven share the credits in Stroszek. Other soundtracks feature music as diverse as Lassus, Leonard Cohen and folksong from around the world (aka ‘world music’); and since 1986, Herzog has directed numerous operas, with a special focus on Wagner (Lohengin at Bayreuth, Tannhäuser many times over). Not surprisingly therefore, Herzog styles the Italian prince in Death for Five Voices as the pre-cursor of Wagner — similarly extreme, and a musical revolutionary.

A world away from the slick televisual presentations of Charles Hazelwood or Howard Goodall, Death For Five Voices is characteristically eccentric, a little bit out-there. Perhaps almost deliberately wayward and undisciplined, it seems to be trying to get inside the strangeness of Gesualdo’s life and music through its own downright strangeness.

Even the ‘normal’ bits of such a music documentary turn out to be a little bizarre. There is a female tenor in Il Complesso Barocco. The Gesualdo Consort appear to be auditonees for The Addams Family: The Musical. And its director, Gerald Place, awkwardly reads his pieces to camera from a spiralbound notebook, like the under-prepared giver of a pre-concert talk.

And then there are the strange bits. Like the severely handicapped Italian child being ridden on a horse by his carers in an indoor paddock. Or the scene in Gesualdo’s ruined castle, where a deranged, magnificently-breasted redhead claims to be the reincarnation of his wife and sings along to a ghetto-blaster. Equally zany, but much more successful, is a delightfully mad exchange between two ageing cooks, man and wife, ruefully discussing the 125 course menu Gesualdo concocted for his wedding. ‘He was the devil incarnate,’ the woman keeps on barking as she stirs one of the banquet’s exotic, re-created ragú.

Herzog seems as much interested in what might be termed ‘folk-musicology’ as any conventional musicological correctness from Il Complesso Barocco’s Alan Curtis or Gerald Place. The stories we get from his cast of real-life locals are doubtless in some cases no more than that — embellished tales, Gesualdo folklore. Did the guilt-ridden Prince really spend three months deforesting an entire valley singlehandedly? Did he really kill his second child, thinking he was not the father, by swinging it to death over three days and three nights, accompanied by a choir? But these time-shifted testimonies are real and rich, as present now as the 400 year old uxoricidal bed, proudly owned by a descendant, or the preserved skeletal-corpses of wife and lover in a Neopolitan church.

A black cat skulks down the back of a beaten-up VW Beetle as the janitor of Gesualdo’s Naples palazzo recounts, in the foreground and with a little too much relish, how a passing monk raped the discarded, 28-times stabbed corpse of the composer’s wife.

That is a moment worth all the film’s faults, a moment as strange and startling as any Gesualdo chord shift.

Join us for our Bonne Maman Big Read in association with Vintage Classics — Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

The classic tale of passion and love has fascinated readers since its publication in 1874. Join Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Troy and Farmer Boldwood as they battle for Bathsheba Everdene’s affection.

In addition to events at the festival, we’ll be hosting free book groups in the months leading up to the festival. So why not read Far From the Madding Crowd with your book group this summer?

Get involved… more about the Big Read
Get ready… The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival 2010

“Rhodes is definately one to watch… a pianist with rock-star attitude”

Classic FM Magazine

TODAY: James is featured in the The Times (Saturday 10 July) — worth picking up a copy if you want to find out what makes him tick.

MONDAY: catch James on BBC breakfast TV.

TUESDAY: James Rhodes at the HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival, 6pm at the Parabola Arts Centre, re-defining the audience of a young classical pianist — make sure you’re there.
sample audio / more about the event | call 0844 576 8970 to book