Little Missenden Festival 2008

Mark Bebbington piano

Mark Bebbington is a truly impressive pianist, and a frequent Festival visitor.  “Mark Bebbington takes Ferguson’s virtuoso demands in his stride”, said Martin Anderson (International Piano) of his recent disc of Ferguson and Gurney, which gave Anthony Burton (BBC Music Magazine) “a remarkable feeling of concentration and inwardness”.  It got a *** rating in the 2005/6 Penguin CD Guide for “an outstanding performance and recording”.

“He has a wonderful palette of colour at his disposal and his mastery of rubato is always apparent… his control is breathtaking: never fussy and always at the service of the music, he compels one to listen and his bell-like tone is a constant delight” (Andrew Plant, Journal of the Ivor Gurney Society).

“The most accessible performance I have heard so far [of Howard Ferguson’s Sonata], and probably the best way into the work for anyone coming to it for the first time” (Gerard McBurney, Tempo)

Mark Bebbington website

John Ireland Charitable Trust website

RVW Society website

Wikipedia article on Howard Ferguson

Francis Pott website

Event 11 2008

English piano discoveries

Mark Bebbington

Saturday October 18th,12 noon

Little Missenden Church

Tickets £11, unreserved

£18 combined tickets for Events 11 and 12 (if booked in advance)

Mark Bebbington’s varied recital re-discovers English piano music which deserves to be heard more.

Ireland was an English impressionist.  The evocative and reflective Sarnia suite is a late masterpiece, a memoir of a stay in Guernsey.

Vaughan Williams’s The lake in the mountains is “deliciously dreamy” – modal harmonies, mostly pastoral in mood. It’s drawn from his first foray into film music – a Leslie Howard scene in Powell & Pressburger’s 49th Parallel.

2008 is Howard Ferguson’s centenary.  He was (rare bird) a 20th century romantic.  Myra Hess launched his fine F minor sonata at one of her famous National Gallery concerts.  The piece’s lucid and sonorous textures make it very accessible, even on first hearing.  

Francis Pott's 1996 Toccata won First Prize in the Second International Prokofiev Composition Competition. Pott creates a kaleidoscopic and virtuosic tour de force through an intriguing web of keyboard figurations.  Farewell to Hirta (1985) paints a sad and atmospheric portrait of the islanders’ final evacuation from the St Kilda archipelago.

“A ravishingly beautiful and moving rhapsody... both old-fashioned and contemporary. The writing is immensely graceful, an unpretentious, personal piece from a composer who really knows the piano” (Tempo)

Little Missenden Festival 2008

Concert supported by the Ireland Trust