Gay Musical Icons Concert Celebrations take place at Sheffield Unviersity

A project at the University of Sheffield which looks at influential homosexual musicians, has kicked off when the first of three concerts took place on October 12th at Firth Hall. 

The concerts form part of the wide-reaching project, with looks at some of music's gay musical icons who have been hugely influential in their chosen field.

Innovative group CHROMA will be here to celebrate The Leonard Bernstein Legacy on November 23, taking in the composer/conductor’s Piano Trio, Clarinet Sonata and Three Meditations from ‘Mass’ for cello and piano.

Making up the concert are the undervalued Ned Rorem’s End of Summer for violin, clarinet and piano, Samuel Barber’s Canzone for violin and piano Op 38 and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Trio for violin, clarinet and piano.

Though Berstein was said to be bisexual, it is known that Barber and Menotti were together from their teenage years.

On November 30th, there will be a reconstructed programme of a concert held on December 16th, 1938 in the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac, the 20th century’s most famous patron of the arts in Europe and also a lesbian.

Two of the works heard were commissioned by her, Poulenc’s Organ Concerto and Satie’s short, secular oratorio Socrate (performed in its piano and soprano version), while a further set of items are Poulenc songs dedicated to her.

Poulenc was openly gay, although he did father a daughter, while Satie was simply eccentric and at a loss as to why his benefactress had specified women only for Socrate.

Anthony Gowing (organ), Peter Hill (piano), Dorset-born soprano Louise Wayman, the in-house Jessop Sinfonia and conductor David Ross are the performers 72 years later.

On December 9th, The Rondeau from the Purcell suite, the theme Benjamin Britten used for his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra will be heard on the stage of the Firth Hall. It is in the form of four cycles of songs he wrote for his life partner Peter Pears, two of them settings of poems by WH Auden, the quite well-known On This Island and the less well-known Fish in Unruffled Lakes, plus Michelangelo Sonnets and Hölderlein Fragments.

Mark Padmore, reckoned by many to be the foremost Britten tenor around today and one of the country’s finest, is in town to perform them with pianist James Baillieu.

For more information about the Concert Series, click here

For more information about the Gay Icons Project, click here


By Jess Parsons