Elena Langer’s colourful, dramatic, appealing and often humorous music has become increasingly familiar to audiences through her pieces, operatic, vocal and orchestral. Her 2016 hit for Welsh National Opera, Figaro Gets a Divorce, was described by Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph as ‘that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact’. Her WNO follow-up, the 2018 vaudeville Rhondda Rips It Up! was wildly popular with audiences across the UK; The Times calling it ‘bursting with irreverent joy’.
This evening provides an unmissable opportunity to hear Elena’s piano, chamber music works, as well as songs, performed by a group of Elena’s highly acclaimed internationally-renowned friends and colleagues.
Programme to include Elena Langer’s works:
Transformations for violin and piano
Cat Songs for soprano, cello piano
Aminta Love Song for violin and piano
Triste Voce for cello solo
Snow for violin and piano
Tucha [Cloud] for soprano and piano
Susanna's Cabaret Song from Figaro Gets a Divorce for soprano and piano
Katya Apekisheva, piano
Kristina Blaumane, cello
Anna Dennis, soprano
Roman Mints, violin
‘The riotous score is a swirling, transparent weave of operetta, cabaret, music hall and jazz... It's bursting with irreverent joy’ — The Times - Rebecca Franks
‘... that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact’ — The Telegraph - Rupert Christensen
‘Langer's score indeed rumbled with atmosphere...’ — Financial Times - Ken Smith
‘She can do sardonic astringency but also evoke surreal otherworldliness or romantic yearning. It all depends on her chosen texts to which she responds in meticulous details.’ — The Times - Richard Morrison
Elena Langer (b. 1974) studied piano and composition at the Moscow Conservatoire. In 1999 she moved to London, continuing her studies at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music. She began writing operas while composer-in-residence at the Almeida Theatre. Her operatic and chamber works have been performed at Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Grand Théâtre, Geneva, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, Opéra National du Rhin and Welsh National Opera. Her opera The Lion’s Face, written with Glyn Maxwell and directed by John Fulljames, toured England and Wales in 2010, including performances at the Linbury Theatre, Covent Garden. Her one-act comic opera Four Sisters, commissioned by Dawn Upshaw, was staged in 2012 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, upstate New York. In December 2012 Songs at the Well, based on Russian folk texts, was dramatized by Dmitri Belyanushkin and staged at the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow. In May 2013 her orchestration of César Cui’s 1913 opera Puss in Boots was performed at the Grand Théâtre, Geneva.
In 2014 Elena wrote the incidental music for David Eldridge’s play Holy Warriors at Shakespeare’s Globe. Her orchestral work Story of an Impossible Love, commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia, was performed in May 2016 in Cambridge and London, and subsequently in Calgary and Karlsruhe, conducted by Justin Brown.
Figaro Gets a Divorce, with a libretto by Sir David Pountney, was premiered in Cardiff in February 2016, with Justin Brown conducting, and subsequently toured around the UK. In 2017 Figaro was performed at the Teatr Wielki in Poznań and at the Grand Théâtre, Geneva, with a live stream on the Arte Channel in Switzerland.
In 2016, Harmonia Mundi released Landscape with Three People, a CD of Elena’s vocal and chamber works. The title piece is a song cycle for soprano, counter-tenor and baroque chamber ensemble based on the poems of Lee Harwood. The CD also contains Ariadne, Elena’s first collaboration with the poet Glyn Maxwell, as well as the light-hearted Cat Songs, settings of the absurdist poetry of Daniil Kharms.
A piano duet, RedMare, was commissioned for the 2017 London Piano Festival and performed there by Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva. Rhondda Rips It Up!, a music hall-style vaudeville celebrating the life of suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas starring Madeleine Shaw and Lesley Garrett, was premiered in Newport in May 2018 and toured to 16 venues across the UK. In March 2019, Boston Symphony Chamber Players performed Five Reflections on Water. Beauty and Sadness, an opera based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata to a libretto by Sir David Pountney, was premiered in Hong Kong in April 2019 with Gergely Madaras conducting.
The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev, premiered Elena's orchestral suite from Figaro Gets a Divorce in January 2020. The suite was premièred in the UK in Glasgow in February 2020 by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gergely Madaras. Elena is currently working on an opera based on Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide to be performed at the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow in 2022.
Katya Apekisheva is prizewinner of the Leeds International Piano competition. She enjoys a busy career performing with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Halle Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, working with renowned conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, David Shallon, Jan Latham-Koenig and Alexander Lazarev.
As a recording artist, Katya has received widespread critical acclaim for her interpretations from Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice award and International Piano Magazine’s Critics’ choice to Classic FM’s CD of the week as well as a Classical Brit award to name but a few. Together with Charles Owen she is a co-Artistic Director of the London Piano Festival.
Cellist Kristina Blaumane has performed as soloist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Chicago Civic Orchestra, Kremerata Baltica, Britten Sinfonia, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Sofia Soloists, Netherlands Wind Ensemble and Dalarna Sinfonietta, as well as all the main orchestras in Latvia.
As a chamber musician she has worked in partnership with such renowned artists as Isaac Stern, Gidon Kremer, Yo Yo Ma, Yuri Bashmet, Leif Ove Andsnes, Janine Jansen, Julian Rachlin, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Bruno Giuranna, Misha Maisky, Nikolaj Znaider, Tatyana Grindenko and Oleg Maisenberg, among others.
Kristina is a winner of many awards including the Latvian Philharmonic Young Musician of the Year, the Latvian television competition 'Alternativa', Carmel International Competition, Musicians Benevolent Fund and Lord Mayor’s Prize. She has recorded for the Onyx, Quartz and BMG labels.
Described by the Times as a ‘delectable soprano and a serene, ever-sentient presence’, Anna Dennis’s notable concert performances have included Britten’s War Requiem at the Berlin Philharmonie, Thomas Adès’ Life Story accompanied by the composer at the Lincoln Centre’s White Light Festival, Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Orquestra Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney Opera House. BBC Proms appearances include performances with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Her recordings include the 2021 Grammy-nominated album of Kastalsky’s Requiem for Fallen Brothers, Purcell’s King Arthur with the Gabrieli Consort and Players, Rameau’s Anacreon of 1754 with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists, three Handel works Siroe, Rodrigo and Joshua with Laurence Cummings and Festspiel Orchester Göttingen, Landscape with Three People a recital of Russian composer Elena Langer’s chamber works, and Sweeter than Roses, a Purcell recital with Julian Perkins.
Violinist Roman Mints has given Russian premieres of works by Desyatnikov, Golijov, Tavener, MacMillan, Scelsi and Mozetich and has also given world premieres of over fifty works by Tabakova, Desyatnikov, Bennett, Finnissy, Irvine, Langer, Vassiliev, Burrell, Miyachi, Duddell, and others.
In 1998 Roman Mints and oboist Dmitry Bulgakov founded the Homecoming Chamber Music Festival in Moscow, which has gained widespread recognition and a substantial following in Russia. The core of Homecoming concert programmes are themed selections of works with one powerful underlying, but not necessarily musical, idea behind them. Since the inception of the festival, Roman has authored more than forty such programmes. In April 2002, Roman co-directed the Suppressed Music project in Russia, which comprised two concerts and a conference on composers whose music had been suppressed. A book and CD were released as a result of this project, by the Klassika XXI Publishing House.