How lucky we are in Rye! Last Friday evening, after the preview of the new and very interesting exhibition in Rye Art Gallery, I visited the White Vine House where the first “Schubert-Salon” event was taking place.
The CLASSICus Group had taken over the intimate front room at the hotel where we listened to piano, oboe and cello pieces written by local composers and were transported by the powerful renditions of operatic arias from Bizet’s “Carmen” and Delibes’ “Lakme”. It can not have been easy to get a grand piano through the various doors, but it was well worth it.
Polo Piatti, who founded CLASSICus in 2015 with Robert Draper, Ian McCrae and Peter Byrom-Smith, believes that music “must give pleasure to and value for the listener”. He wants to give composers, singers and musicians from Sussex and beyond an opportunity and space to perform their own work, and to encourage the creation of “melodic and classical music”.
Polo Piatti is an award- winning British-Argentine composer and concert pianist, who is composer in residence at St Mary in the Castle in Hastings. In 2012 he founded in Hastings Europe’s first ever “International Composers Festival” and he is Artistic Director of the Hastings Sinfonia Orchestra.
He has worked in the UK and abroad, often in Japan, as composer, conductor, teacher and lecturer. There is much more to know about Polo and more information can be found on his website, or on www.classicusmusic.com about these musical evenings. An album of his latest suite is being released in 2016.
Polo feels that in the “last decade classical music has become more and more elitist, exclusive and impenetrable, and only when people meet the creators close up, talk about it, ask questions, get some sort of relationship to it, and experience it in a relaxed and more informal atmosphere, can they appreciate and follow it.”
This was certainly born out on Friday night at the unexpected magical evening in the ground floor tapas and wine bar at the White Vine House in the High Street .
Polo hopes that Rye and surroundings will appreciate this new opportunity for lovers of classical music and you can be part of it on the first Friday of every month from 6pm. The event is free but contributions can be made by becoming a member of CLASSICus.
Photo : Heidi Foster