A talk by Igor Kennaway, local pianist, conductor and music teacher
21st March, 2023
In this event report, Ludlow and Marches Humanists Chair Malcolm Rochefort, offers his perspective on Igor’s absorbing multi-media exploration of music.
Photo © Zuleika Henry Photography
Igor now lives locally in Wigmore, and is a conductor, pianist and music lecturer. He graduated in history from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then received a Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust bursary to attend the Royal Academy of Music. During that time he was mentored and became lifelong friends with Vaughan Williams’ widow Ursula Vaughan Williams.
He has worked as a pianist and conductor in Germany and throughout Europe, been involved in many broadcast radio performances for the BBC and abroad, and worked with, among others, Daniel Barenboim (in Bayreuth), Sir Georg Solti (with the Vienna Philharmonic), Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica von Stade and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Despite this erudite and slightly formidable background (to us less musically gifted mortals), Igor gave us a most memorable and enjoyable talk, illustrated with an excellent audio slide show, with accompanying musical illustrations, most sensitively played by Igor on a mobile electric piano.
I hesitate to try and precis his theme, but I took away that when we cannot or do not wish to talk, music can and does fill the void.
He explored the links with the visual world and colour, with artwork by Kandinski (abstract illustrating the vibrancy of colour, and expressionistic work), exploration of the difference between realism and evocation of atmosphere in Beethoven’s sixth (pastoral) symphony (realistic birdsong, and the storm), colour with a Mark Rothko.
During the presentation, Igor illustrated colours (timbres) of tone and how they affect one’s interpretation of music, using J S Bach. He then moved on to how we associate certain well-known pieces of music with occasions (Mendelssohn’s wedding march from midsummer night’s dream), films (the zither music of Anton Karas with the Third Man), horror (Bernard Hermann’s discordant screeching strings from Psycho) – all without visual illustration.
Mahler’s use of dissonance in his 10th symphony, possibly reflecting his life at the time as Mahler’s wife left him for another man. This may have been a result of a chance meeting and long discussion with Sigmund Freud, which, oddly, as they were both Austrian, took place on the North Sea coast at Nordwijk, in Holland. This was illustrated with Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. Evocation of the sea, illustrated by Hokusai’s The Great Wave (which Debussy used on the cover of his music for La Mer), and Turner’s ‘Breakers on a Flat Beach’, aurally illustrated by Debussy’s ‘Jeux de Vagues’.
I was struck by how well Debussy’s music fitted with Turner’s painting. We then had a contrast of an actual photograph of moonrise over Bass rock with Turner’s almost impressionistic ‘Moonlight on the Medway’, aurally represented by Igor’s beautiful rendition of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. And the rest is silence …we ended with Elgar’s Nimrod, fading into silence.
I think we were all impressed by the visual and aural beauty of Igor’s presentation, and provoked into thinking how we use and interpret music, and its direct link to our emotions and inner thoughts.