Programme

Debussy - Petite Suite (arr. Gordon Davies)
Mozart - Adagio for glass harmonica K356 (arrangement and variations by Sally Beamish)
Hindemith - Kleine Kammermusik Op. 24 No.2

Interval

Moondog - Bird of Paradise
Holst - Wind Quintet in A Flat, Op.14 (revised version by Raymond Head)
Medaglia - Suite popular brasileira

Robert Manasse (Flute)
Melanie Ragge (Oboe)
Neyire Ashworth (Clarinet)
Stephen Stirling (Horn)
Meyrick Alexander (Bassoon)

The New London Chamber Ensemble (NLCE) is a wind quintet with a difference. For over two decades they have challenged traditional chamber music combining classic repertoire with semi-staged works featuring drama, speech, and action.

The NLCE has performed globally, including notable appearances at the Banff festival, the Trasimeno festival and the Wigmore Hall with pianist Angela Hewitt, and collaborating with artists like Dame Evelyn Glennie, Prunella Scales and Timothy West.

They actively promote new music and regularly commission works from composers such as Ailis Ni Riain, Julian Philips, John Woolrich, Philip Cashian, and Martin Butler.

Their acclaimed discography includes recordings of chamber music by John Woolrich, Carl Nielsen, Lennox Berkeley, and Martin Butler, featuring collaborations with the Navarra Quartet, bassist Leon Bosch, and narrator Simon Callow.

The NLCE served as Ensemble in Residence for the National Youth Chamber Orchestra for over a decade, and works with music colleges and schools providing masterclasses and collaborating on side-by-side projects.

Robert Manasse (Flute)

Robert Manasse is working as a free-lance flute-player with a wide variety of orchestras including the English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Welsh and English National Operas, The Philharmonia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. He is a member of the London Mozart Players, works with Jane Manning’s contemporary music group Jane’s Minstrels, and with the chamber music groups CHROMA and the Galliard Ensemble. Robert has a long-standing duo with the harpist Helen Cole. He studied with Kate Hill initially, and then later with Michael Cox and Sebastian Bell as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music.

Robert has taught at Dartington International Summer School, for the Royal Academy of Music, at the Junior Guildhall and at the international Kammermusik Festival in Oxford as part of the Albion Ensemble. He teaches at the Junior Department of the Guildhall School of Music in London.

Recordings include the award-winning CD of music by Harrison Birtwistle made in association with the Galliard Ensemble, music by Tony Payne played by Jane’s Minstrels, and arrangements of Beethoven played by the Albion wind ensemble.

Robert plays a silver Louis Lot flute from 1883. He read Applied Biology at Imperial College and later took a PhD in Plant Biochemistry.

Melanie Ragge (Oboe)

Melanie Ragge has performed nationally and internationally as a recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral player.

She’s played in venues as far flung as Vancouver Island, Malta, and Northern Sweden as well as UK venues such as St John’s Smith Square, the Royal Opera House and Wigmore Hall. A founding member of the New London Chamber Ensemble, she has released several CDs, including Nielsen’s Wind & Piano Chamber Music. ‘…Performances and sound quality are outstanding in every regard’ International Record Review.

Originally a medical student at King’s College Cambridge, Melanie ultimately graduated with a Master of Philosophy degree in Musicology. She was subsequently awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Royal College of Music where she studied oboe with Michael Winfield, contemporary oboe with Edwin Roxburgh and piano with Phyllis Sellick.

Melanie has since collaborated with numerous artists including the Dante, Schidlof and Emperor string quartets, pianists Ann Martin-Davis, Michael Dussek and Angela Hewitt, and baritone Gerald Finlay. Over the last few years, her performances have included recitals with Angela Hewitt and the New London Chamber Ensemble at Wigmore Hall, the premiere of the ensemble’s newly commissioned Nonet by Martin Butler with the Dante Quartet at the Cheltenham Festival, touring and recording Mahler’s 10th Symphony at Philharmonie Hall in Berlin with the International Mahler Orchestra, and recitals at the Royal Opera House with the Ellipsis Ensemble. Her most recent recording was a disc Martin Butler’s chamber music with the New London Chamber Ensemble and Navarra Quartet for NMC.

She regularly coaches and gives masterclasses; she has been a guest tutor for numerous projects, including Chamber Music International, the Aberystwyth Music Festival, Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater and the Penderecki Musik Akademie, and was for many years Associate Director and woodwind tutor for the National Youth Chamber Orchestra. As well as her work at the Royal Academy, she teaches at the Purcell School of Music, and coaches for Cambridge University. Her scientific interest continues in the form of ongoing research into the use of Electromyography to help to reduce strain injuries in musical training.

In 2018, the New London Chamber Ensemble recorded Philip Cashian’s dectet Settala’s Machine in the Royal Academy of Music’s Angela Burgess Recital Hall, with Moriarty Winds, recent graduates, and Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellows at the Academy. With support from the Royal Academy of Music’s Research Department, Melanie Ragge commissioned film-maker David Lefeber to make a short film of the recording project, exploring the educational value of side-by-side projects in preparing young musicians for the profession.

You can watch a film about Mel’s work developing her online teaching – From No Tech To High Tech – here: https://vimeo.com/352064378/78d0f118b5

You can view another short film of Melanie’s work with oboe students from the Royal Academy of Music, Creativity in a Crisis; lockdown miniatures by oboists at the Academy here: https://vimeo.com/459367076

You can see the film Settala’s Machine by Philip Cashian here: https://vimeo.com/352064378/78d0f118b5

or listen to the audio file here: https://soundcloud.com/nlce-1/philip-cashian-settalas-machine-for-wind-dectet-new-london-chamber-ensemble-and-moriarty-winds

Neyire Ashworth (Clarinet)

Neyire Ashworth pursues a career as clarinet soloist and chamber musician, with a focus on small-scale contemporary music theatre and inter-disciplinary performance. She is dedicated to pushing the frontiers of instrumental performance through her personal creative work and multi-disciplinary collaborations.

She won Best Performer Award and was nominated for Best New Writing Award from Buxton Fringe Festival for her solo show Stolen Voices and her instrumental theatre piece Stenclmusic, with music by Rachel Stott, was awarded a European Association of Jewish Culture Award. In 2018 she was nominated for a Paul Hamlyn Artist’s Award.

From 1988 – 1994 Neyire was music director and performer with the Besht Tellers, a Jewish storytelling theatre company. During this time she honed her skills as klezmer musician, composer and improviser, whilst touring Jewish communities and theatre festivals internationally.

With the Britten-Pears Ensemble she worked closely with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett and recorded several discs for ASV, and as a member of the clarinet quartet No Strings Attached, she regularly toured the globe, performing and running workshops for the British Council. The ensemble won first prize in the Royal Overseas League Chamber Music competition, were prize-winners in the Gaudeamus International Contemporary Music competition, and were at the forefront of pioneering creative work in UK prisons.

With the Cambridge New Music Players she was very active in the UK and European contemporary music scene in the 1990s before moving to Venezuela to take up the principal clarinet position in the Maracaibo Symphony Orchestra.

More recent work includes the National Theatre’s highly acclaimed production of War Horse, which ran for seven years in London’s West End and George Aperghis’s Little Red Riding Hood for the Almeida Opera Festival as well as several recordings under the Oboe Classics label, notably Très Francaix – chamber music by Jean Francaix.

Neyire has been Countess of Munster Award beneficiary and a Live Music Now! Artist. She made her London solo debut at the South Bank Centre as a Park Lane Group Young Artist.

Neyire studied with Anton Weinberg, Julian Farrell and Dame Thea King at the Guildhall School of Music in London, Walter Boeykens in Rotterdam and Dave Weber in New York City. She is a passionate educator, coach and mentor, and she teaches clarinet at the Junior Department of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Stephen Stirling (Horn)

Stephen Stirling is a renowned horn soloist. Since studying at the Royal Northern College of Music with Ifor James and later with Julian Baker, he has worked mostly in the rather rarefied world of chamber music. He enjoys an enormously varied career travelling all over the world, particularly relishing playing in unusual and far-flung places. Stephen is the Principal Horn of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

He has broadcast concertos on BBCTV and Radio 3, and appeared with orchestras such as the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Orchestra of St John’s, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with Richard Hickox, Sir Neville Marriner, Heinz Holliger, Iván Fischer and Douglas Boyd. His recordings of the complete Mozart Horn Concertos with the City of London Sinfonia are frequently broadcast on Classic fM. He has also recorded the virtuosic Double Horn Concertos by Vivaldi. Gary Carpenter’s marvellous new Horn Concerto was written for him and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and given its world and broadcast premiere in April 2005. Other recent first performances have included solo works by Martin Butler and Stephen Dodgson.

Stephen has a world-wide reputation as a chamber musician being in constant demand at festivals in the UK and abroad. He is a member of Endymion Ensemble, The Fibonacci Sequence, Capricorn, Arpege and the New London Chamber Ensemble.

His many critically acclaimed CDs include the first recordings with Endymion, of York Bowen’s Horn Sonata and his beautiful Quintet for Horn and Strings, and Mozart’s entire output for wind ensemble with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. CDs of horn quintets by Stanford and Dunhill have just been released. His second recording of the Brahms Horn Trio, with the Florestan Trio, was nominated for a Gramophone award and in the USA, Fanfare described it as the equal of any recording whether modern or ‘Golden Age’. Spring 2007 saw the release by Deux-Elles of Horn – rare works of chamber music featuring the horn, with the Fibonacci Sequence.

Stephen is a professor at Trinity College of Music, London, on the faculty of the Yellowbarn Summer School in Vermont and a seasoned participant at the Dartington International Summer School.

Meyrick Alexander (Bassoon)

For thirty years, Meyrick Alexander held the position of Principal Bassoon of the Philharmonia Orchestra, before which he was a member of the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia. He currently plays principal with the London Chamber Orchestra and has played with nearly every orchestra in the UK. He also works with the leading period instrument ensembles and contemporary music groups. He has played and recorded as a soloist on many occasions around the world and has played on the soundtracks of a large number of feature films and TV programmes.

In the field of education, Meyrick was Head of Woodwind at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and continues there as a tutor. He has also been a member of staff at the Royal Northern College of Music, Birmingham Conservatoire and principally at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he was awarded a Fellowship for his work creating their Orchestral Artistry course. Meyrick has given recitals and masterclasses around the UK, Europe, USA, Australia and the Far East and joined the bassoon staff at the Royal Academy of Music in 2020.