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Nov
15
Thu
Ben Crosland Brass Group @ Lauderdale House
Nov 15 @ 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm

with Steve Lodev (keyboards), Steve Waterman & Martin Shaw (tpts,), Mark Nightingale & Barnaby Dickinson (tmbs)

Ben Crosland, acoustic and electric bass player, is based in Yorkshire and assembled this premier-league brass section to realise a commission from the 2011 Marsden Jazz Festival, inspired by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, An Open Place. The compositions are inspired by specific pieces, such as Henry Moore’s Reclining Figures, and Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man, the whole composition is suffused with the gentle, pastoral quality of the Park. A project like this would be easy meat for a classical brass group, but here the fascination is how some of the most technically-brilliant brassmen of the jazz world preserve the excitement of jazz, spontaneity and creativity without ‘raising the roof’, which in other circumstances they could easily do.

See event website.

May
1
Wed
Marx and the Village Community @ The Chapel at Highgate Cemetery
May 1 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

In this lecture, Professor Gareth Stedman Jones looks at the last decade and a half of Marx’s life, a period in which he effectively gave up further work on Capital and read up instead on the village community and the early history of man. He was interested in particular in the new work on pre-history which developed from the 1860s onwards connecting this with a notion of primitive communism and an epoch in history before patriarchy and political hierarchy.

Professor Gareth Stedman Jones is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge University since 1974. He was Professor of Political Science, History Faculty, Cambridge University from 1997 and in 2010 became Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include An End to Poverty? (2004), a long introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (2002), and The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, co-edited with Gregory Claeys, 2011.

He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Marx commissioned by Penguin and a more general work on political thought between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848.

Doors open at 7pm and wine and nibbles will be served. The talk starts promptly at 7.30pm and will last about an hour.

Tickets are non-refundable but, as a courtesy to others, please let us know if you cannot attend.

Apr
23
Thu
Les Femme Circus @ Jacksons Lane
Apr 23 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Les Femmes Circus are an all-female circus troupe who combine circus with theatre, dance, singing and percussion to create work that is exciting, moving and breathtaking.

The company are all graduates of the National Centre for Circus Arts and use a range of circus disciplines in their work including aerial, acrobatics, hula hoop and juggling.

With an aesthetic based in the 1950s, Les Femmes Circus use comedy and manipulation to create a world where circus is the norm, playing with fear, love and fantasy, and revealing how fun it can be to misbehave.

Fierce and full of power, the company want to connect with their audiences – and to do so not only by performing tricks, but by telling a story, revealing their feelings, and allowing the audience to fully experience the performance, both visually and emotionally.

Apr
24
Fri
Les Femme Circus @ Jacksons Lane
Apr 24 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Les Femmes Circus are an all-female circus troupe who combine circus with theatre, dance, singing and percussion to create work that is exciting, moving and breathtaking.

The company are all graduates of the National Centre for Circus Arts and use a range of circus disciplines in their work including aerial, acrobatics, hula hoop and juggling.

With an aesthetic based in the 1950s, Les Femmes Circus use comedy and manipulation to create a world where circus is the norm, playing with fear, love and fantasy, and revealing how fun it can be to misbehave.

Fierce and full of power, the company want to connect with their audiences – and to do so not only by performing tricks, but by telling a story, revealing their feelings, and allowing the audience to fully experience the performance, both visually and emotionally.

May
29
Mon
aspidistra drawing room orchestra @ Lauderdale House
May 29 @ 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

A concert of popular music from the beginning of the last century. Performed in style by this authentic ensemble consisting of string quartet, piano flute and oboe, praised for their lively interpretation of the genre.

The Aspidistra Drawing Room Orchestra is an orchestra that specialises in the type of light classical music that is usually referred to as “Palm Court Music” or “Salon Music”. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was an enormous appetite for light music. The Aspidistra Drawing Room Orchestra started, from very small beginnings: a group of friends and a folder of music. However, since the mid 1990s, they have steadily expanded their repertoire, continually hunting for new material.

Aspidistra made their Radio debut when the BBC used some tracks from the Best of Palm Court as background music for the radio play Tears of War on Remembrance Day 2002. Since then their recordings have been heard regularly on Brian Kay’s light programme and as background music for other radio plays. Their music was also used for The Producer Prince, a TV documentary based on interviews with Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cuto, the son of an illustrious Sicilian family. Sadly his father squandered the family fortunes and died penniless in 1927.