MUSIC AT MATRIX concert series
The MUSIC AT MATRIX concert series is a range of concerts held in the beautiful hall at Matrix Arts Centre. The aim is to enrich and broaden students’ engagement with music by exposing them to high-calibre, professional musicians.
Neil Brand
4pm Sunday 30 November
Neil Brand, composer, writer, broadcaster and pianist, opens up the treasure house of the art form of which he has been an undisputed master for forty years - silent cinema and its music.
From the earliest trick films, through the first Western, Gothic and Thriller movies made before sound, to a complete comedy short by one of the greatest of silent comics, Neil will set jaw-dropping sequences from silent classics in their historic and cinematic context and accompany them live and fully-improvised on the piano, all the while explaining how the music is working.
An unmissable event!
Show lasts two hours, to include interval and a Q and A at the end. Suggested age 10+.
Neil Brand is a distinguished composer/writer/performer/broadcaster. He has toured the world as a well-known live accompanist for silent film and has a very fruitful relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with his acclaimed orchestral scores for Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail, and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood, published by Faber Music, and his Concert Dramas including Wind in the Willows and A Christmas Carol. Most recently he has composed Echoes of the North with the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, The Hound of the Baskervilles for the BBC with Mark Gatiss as Sherlock (BBC4) as well as the score for the 1925 western The Winning of Barbara Worth which opens the Locarno festival this year. He is well-known as a TV presenter with five hugely successful ‘Sound of …’ series on BBC4, is a regular presenter on the Proms, Radio 4's Add to Playlist and Soul Music, is a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Member and Visiting Professor of the Royal Academy of Music, was awarded the BASCA Gold Badge in 2016 and is considered one of the finest improvising musicians and musical storytellers in the world. www.neilbrand.com
“Thank you so much for MUSIC AT MATRIX! The concerts we’ve been to have been very special evenings for all of us. The opportunity to come out on a Sunday evening and hear such high-class musicians in such an intimate setting is really magical and a true privilege. There’s also something quite special about the events being in the same place where the children themselves have been learning music for so long.”