Following the great success of her Chopin evening last year, Lucy Parham returns with a programme devoted to the life and music of that most romantic of all piano composers, the great Franz Liszt
Lucy Parham with Harriet Walter and Henry Goodman, two of our best loved English actors, offer an enjoyable and informative insight into the life and inspiration of Franz Liszt. 200 years after his birth, he is praised as one of the most prolific and influential composers in the history of music.
Throughout his life, Franz Liszt burned the candle at both ends. A child prodigy who became the greatest keyboard virtuoso of his time, he was also a prolific composer, whose output ranged from hundreds of piano pieces to symphonies, tone poems, songs and oratorios. An indefatigable traveller, a friend and supporter of Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner, his life was crammed full of incident and romance, and he was drawn to women like a moth to a flame. “A Heart in Pilgrimage” was how he once described his romantic life, reflecting also that his choices with women had often been unwise ones.
Drawn largely from his prolific and colourful letters and interspersed with some of his most ecstatic and expressive piano music, Odyssey of Love is a portrait of his relationship with the two most important women in his life: the aristocratic free-thinking rebel and mother of his three children, Marie d’Agoult and the bizarre cigar-smoking intellectual Princess Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein.
Acknowledged as one of Britain’s finest pianists, Lucy Parham first came to public attention on winning the 1984 BBC TV Young Musician of the Year Piano Class, since when she has performed extensively throughout the UK and Europe, South Africa, USA, Canada and Russia.
Actress Harriet Walter, who was made a dame in the New Year Honours List, has enjoyed a distinguished career on stage and screen spanning three decades.
Henry Goodman has starred on the British stage and Broadway and is the recipient of numerous awards.
“There is no better version than the one devised and presented by Lucy Parham. A lovely entertainment flawlessly performed.”
The Independent on Lucy Parham’s Dear Clara
Tickets are £15 and can be booked online, or by calling the box office at 01728 885 650 or from Serendipity, Southwold and Focus Organic, Halesworth