Torquay Welcomes New ISM President

Roger Vignoles succeeds Colin Bradbury at ISM Annual Conference

The distinguished accompanist Roger Vignoles (left) is the President of the Incorporated Society of Musicians for 2007-08. He succeeded the eminent clarinettist Colin Bradbury at the conclusion of the Society’s annual conference in Torquay on 10-13 April 2007.

At the same time, the illustrious music historian and organist Roderick Swanston became President Elect for the year. He will take over as President from Roger Vignoles at the ISM’s next annual conference, in Buxton on 8-11 April 2008.

Roger Vignoles commented: ‘This is indeed an honour. The profession faces great challenges, and I look forward to tackling these and upholding the reputation of the Society throughout my presidential year.’

At the Society’s annual Specialist Section meetings, also held in Torquay during the annual conference, Teresa Cahill became Warden of the Performers & Composers Section for 2007-08, Charlotte Ellis Warden of the Private Teachers Section, and Tim Daniell Warden of the Music in Education Section.

The four-day annual conference, entitled ‘Reclaiming the Stage’, was chaired by Colin Bradbury. It discussed the place of art music in today’s society, and focused particularly on the importance of education and state funding. The keynote speech was given by the Master of the Queen’s Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CBE (below, right, with Colin Bradbury). In a wide-ranging and provocative address, he spoke out against the current government’s arts policy, condemning ‘[this] utterly philistine government, whose Prime Minister recently read a platitudinous speech about the health of the arts in Britain, when his own horizons are rock and pop’. The texts of the speeches by Colin Bradbury and Sir Peter, as well as the file of press cuttings about the conference, can be found at www.ism.org/annualconference.

There were also sessions with BBC Radio 3’s Roger Wright, who tackled a varied range of questions raised by conference participants; Dr Lauren Stewart, who presented some of the results from her research into music and the brain; and Oliver Davies, who gave a presentation on the Museum of Music History. A panel discussion on ‘Classical Outreach’ included Ben Ellin (Emfeb Orchestra), Gillian Green (Live Music Now!), Graham Sheffield (Barbican) and Maureen Lehane Wishart (Jackdaws). At the annual gala dinner, the guest speaker was the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who drew parallels between the challenges posed by new technology for both journalism and music. Other events included a concert by the Zephyr Ensemble of London and a private viewing of the film Rhythm Is It, featuring Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic working with Berlin schoolchildren on The Rite of Spring. On the final day, delegates visited Exeter Cathedral and sang Evensong.

Ends: 05/2007

Note to Editors: The Incorporated Society of Musicians, founded in 1882, is the UK’s professional body for musicians. It aims to promote the art of music and uphold the honour and interests of the musical profession by protecting the interests of musicians, raising professional standards, and providing legal advice and other benefits to its members. Its 5,000 members include performers, teachers, composers, conductors, organists, writers and others involved in professional musical work.

Presidents of the ISM (and Wardens of the Society’s three Specialist Sections) serve for one year. They precede their 12 months of office with a year as President Elect (or Warden Elect), and follow it with a year as Past President (or Past Warden).

Biographical notes of the ISM’s new President and President Elect are below.

Contact: Neil Hoyle, Chief Executive, T. 020 7629 4413 

ROGER VIGNOLES - ISM PRESIDENT 2007-08

Roger Vignoles was inspired by the playing of Gerald Moore to pursue a career as an accompanist after leaving university. He completed his training with the distinguished Viennese-born teacher Paul Hamburger.

Since then, reviewers around the world have consistently recognised his distinctive qualities as a performer. Among his first partners was the Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström, whom he regularly accompanied throughout the 1970s and 80s. During this period he also developed fruitful collaborations with Dame Kiri te Kanawa; with Sir Thomas Allen, recording many works including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Winterreise; and with Sarah Walker, in a wide repertoire of song from German Lieder and French Mélodies to cabaret songs by Gershwin, Britten and others.

Recent seasons have included tours with Sylvia McNair, Dame Felicity Lott, Susan Graham, Véronique Gens, Sir Thomas Allen and Joan Rodgers, as well as recitals with Olaf Bär, Kathleen Battle, Christine Brewer, Brigitte Fassbaender, Bernarda Fink, Christine Schaefer, Thomas Hampson, Lorraine Hunt, Stephan and Christoph Genz, Monica Groop and Sarah Walker, including appearances at the Bath, Cheltenham, Brighton, Aldeburgh, Prague, Schleswig-Holstein, Verbier and Ravinia Festivals. He is also a regular visitor to the Schubertiade in Feldkirch.

In 1997, the Schubert year, he devised and directed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall a week-long series entitled ‘Landscape into Song’, in which his culminating performance of Winterreise with Robert Holl was described by The Times as ‘one of the most memorable performances of the year’. In 1998 he inaugurated the Nagaoka Winter Festival in Japan, giving recitals and masterclasses based on Schubert’s Winterreise, and has subsequently returned each year as artistic director. Last December he was the subject of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Artist in Focus’ series. In 2001 he took part in the Schumann Festival at London’s South Bank, giving recitals with Wolfgang Holzmair, Christiane Oelze and Robert Holl, and gave staged performances of the complete Britten Canticles in Barcelona with John Mark Ainsley and Michael Chance.

Among his recordings, La Belle Epoque with Susan Graham (devoted to the songs of Reynaldo Hahn), Nuits d’Etoiles with Véronique Gens (Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc) and a CD of Strauss, Mahler and Marx with Katarina Karneus have all been nominated for Gramophone awards, while his recording of Beethoven songs with Stephan Genz on Hyperion won the 1999 Award in the Song category. Recent releases include the complete Wolf Mörike-Lieder with Stephan Genz; Canciones Amatorias, a CD of Spanish songs with Bernarda Fink; and Strauss songs with Christine Brewer on Hyperion.

Future engagements include recitals with Christine Brewer, Christine Rice, Kate Royal, Measha Brueggergosman, John Mark Ainsley, Bruce Ford, Robert Holl, Miah Persson, Wolfgang Holzmair, and Mark Padmore. In 2007 he will be the artistic director of ‘The Leeds Lieder Plus Festival’.

RODERICK SWANSTON MA MusB (Cantab) FRCM FRCO GRSM LRAM - ISM PRESIDENT ELECT 2007-08

Roderick Swanston was educated at Stowe School, the RCM, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he held the organ scholarship. He lectures for Birkbeck College University of London Faculty for Continuing Education, for the Humanities Department of Imperial College, at King’s College, London, and for the Foreign Studies Programme of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. Until August 2004 he was a professor at the RCM, holding a number of posts including Reader in Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies. He taught a variety of courses and inaugurated a large number of others.

Roderick is a frequent broadcaster, and on New Year’s Eve 1999 co-hosted an 18-hour survey of Western music on Radio 3 entitled Unfinished Symphony. In 1995 he wrote and presented on Radio 3 twelve monthly programmes on the history of British music, entitled Fairest Isle. Since 1995 he has conducted 21 interviews with prominent figures in early music, entitled Behind the Masque. He wrote and presented two series of programmes entitled Verdi Voices and Wagner Voices. He has also broadcast on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on music inspired by Ancient Rome, and on Anthony Milner, one of his teachers. He has been a regular contributor to Classic CD, Gramophone’s ‘Early Music Quarterly’ magazine and BBC Music Magazine, and has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement and Prospect magazine.

Roderick is in demand as a guest lecturer. He has appeared in Riga, Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Venice; at the National Gallery (eg, ‘Music in the Pictures of Titian’), Royal Academy of Arts (eg, ‘Italian music in the great days of Dresden’), the BBC Proms, the Chichester Festival, Tate Britain and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, USA (eg, ‘Musical Parallels in England and France between 1820 and1840’), the Arts Club (eg, on ‘Ingres and Music’) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; at Birkbeck College’s Faculty for Continuing Education (eg, ‘Musical Portrayals of Judith and Holofernes’); at the South Bank, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House, Wigmore Hall (eg, Wolf’s Mörike Lieder), and St John’s Smith Square; and at several festivals, including Martin Randall’s Austro-Hungarian Music Festival, the Festival of Music on the Rhine and Festivals of Music in Rome, Venice, Prague and – in 2006 – Naples (for all of which he is the artistic director), the Chichester Festivities, the Bath Mozart and Summer Festivals, the St Alban’s International Organ Festival, and the first three of the St John’s Smith Square song-series. He is the programme planner for a series of concerts in the Chichester Festivities which explores some by-ways of music as part of a context for more familiar works. He has lectured for Martin Randall Travel in Berlin, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. He gave the Keith Brown Memorial Lecture for the Liverpool Medical Institute, lectured on Handel both for the Handel Festival and the festival Celebrating Handel in Malta, and gave the Eva Turner Memorial Lecture of the UK Wagner Society in 2002.

In August 2003 Roderick toured South Africa with the London Song Circle, presenting concerts, lecturing and broadcasting. That November, he finished a four-year sequence of two-day Saturday schools on Wagner’s Ring for the Wagner Society in London. In 2004 he lectured on ‘Music and the Painting of El Greco’ and ‘Music and the Russian Landscape in the time of Tolstoy’ at the National Gallery, and planned and lectured for the Bach Pilgrimage to the places where he lived and worked, the Austro-Hungarian Music Festival and the Festival of Music in St Petersburg. In 2005 he was invited by the opera house in Seattle to lecture as part of the events around their performance of Wagner’s Ring, and in 2005 and 2006 was the English music lecturer at the summer festival at Verbier in Switzerland. In November 2005 he visited the Isle of Man to give lectures on ‘Music in Britain in the 19th Century’ and a talk on ‘Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Napoleon’. He also gave a lecture on ‘Rubens and Music’ as part of the Rubens exhibition events at the National Gallery.

In December 1994, Roderick was awarded a fellowship of the RCM, and in 1995 and 1999 spent a term as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA. In 1998 he was invited to Hong Kong as the external examiner for the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts.

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