Take a seat at the Manoel Theatre on Tuesday 5 April and prepare your vocal chords to whisper the words: ‘God! I remember that!’ as Kim and Robin Colvill take a trip down memory lane with classical piano pieces we have come to love. They tell Marie Benoît a little more about their forthcoming concert.
Robin and Kim Colvill first began performing together around sixteen years ago and from the start they found that audiences everywhere enjoyed the format of beautiful classical music with an informative yet entertaining narrative concerning the lives of the great composers. “We were immediately successful with this unique type of classical presentation and have since devised a further ten programmes,” says Kim. “Our aim has always been to play works that have a melody, that may be recognisable, that entertain and are not too long,” she explains.
The programme they have chosen for Malta is The Nostalgic Piano and it was first written about two years ago in response to their audiences' requests for pieces that held special memories for them. “These compositions all seem to be of a nostalgic nature and not often performed by concert pianists today,” Kim continues. For the moment it is their best selling concert, both with concert organisers who choose it over and above their other concert programmes and with the audiences throughout the UK and Europe.
“Above all, most of the works included in the programme are now favourites of Robin – like Clair de Lune, Rustle of Spring and the Warsaw Concerto.”
Kim is generally a narrator, but in this programme at the Manoel Theatre we can look forward to her playing two short duets with Robin. “In my younger days I studied music and was a keen amateur pianist and I now enjoy playing the occasional duet with Robin.” Today her main talent lies in the research of composers and writing of the texts for the concerts.
Which are her favourite pieces and composers? “When we first met, some twenty years ago, Robin, influenced by his years at the Mozarteum in Salzburg Austria, was more inclined towards the 'classical' period – with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert as the main stay of his repertoire. However, Kim – who loves almost every style of music, but particularly pieces with beautiful or grand melodies, encouraged Robin to expand his repertoire and include works by the romantic and later composers. “Today,” says Kim, “he still loves Mozart in particular, but also Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and anything that he is practising at the time!” They both admit to disliking most (but not all) contemporary classical music and yet Kim, in particular, really enjoys music from the West End and Broadway musicals like South Pacific and My Fair Lady.
In Malta, Robin is playing a really varied programme and includes Liszt, Rachmaninov and the Warsaw Concerto by Richard Addinsell, which is in the style of Rachmaninov.
The Colvills have embarked on many interesting projects, but one of their greatest achievements was to successfully re-enact the Liszt Grand Tours of 1840/41 by performing in the 73 towns and cities that originally hosted Liszt's concerts in Great Britain. “ No other pianist has attempted this,” says Robin. “It was a self-organised tour and proved incredibly difficult to fix with literally hundreds of telephone calls by Robin to find organisers and venues with good pianos in every single town.”
After giving 17 concerts in a two-month period they were exhausted from both the playing and travelling and so enlisted the help of a top London PR Agent to help with media, advertising and publicity for the remaining concerts. They gave a further 25 concerts in the following three months and the rest were given on an ad hoc basis over a two-year period.
“The great Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt was an extraordinary pianist – the greatest pianist of his day. He was only a young man at the time of his British tour, the first of many during the Lisztomania years of 1840-1848, which gave rise to over 1,000 concerts throughout Europe and beyond. Liszt was adored and feted wherever he went – by the ladies in particular! who would snatch at his white gloves, his cigar butts or locks of his hair,” Kim explains. The narration in the Malta concert will include one or two reviews which will give some idea of his amazing playing. The piece that Robin has chosen to play is Legend No.2 St. Francis Walking on the Waters and was written after Liszt had stopped touring. “It is a virtuosic work and includes all the technical devices that Liszt invented and for which he has become renowned,” Robin says of this piece.
With around 70 concerts each year and much travelling, the Colvills have many humorous and poignant tales to tell. There was the time when Robin arrived at a castle only to find an old forte piano (with a much-reduced keyboard suitable only for Mozart!) and had to play a programme of Grieg. Another time bats appeared from the roof of a Scottish church and flew rather too closely to their heads! Kim also recalls the time when Robin was rudely interrupted by an enthusiastic drunk who insisted on shaking his hands and kissing him in the middle of a difficult piece of Liszt. Robin recalls another incident: “In a cold dressing room in the North of England Kim decided to put on her ballgown over her trousers, but then forgot to take them off for the concert. Thankfully they couldn't be seen!”
And then there have been the usual problems of coping with spiders, flies, mosquitos, drafty, dusty theatres and over-enthusiastic lighting technic-ians who offer disco lighting in variously changing colours for each piece!
But they agree that overall they have spent many wonderful years touring together, both on land and at sea. They have visited Malta on several occasions during the past few years, but only ever briefly while on a cruise. “On this occasion,” says Kim “we are looking forward to seeing a little more of the island and especially to performing at the historic Manoel Theatre.”
The interview was conducted by e-mail