Tom Poster - piano and Rosalind Ventris - viola

Assembly House Classical presents

Thursday 18th December at 1:00 pm

The Assembly House, Norwich

Programme

Hélène Fleury-Roy Fantasie (1910)

Luise Adolpha Le Beau Drei Stucke

Rebecca Clarke Morpheus

Ivor Gurney Sleep (arr. Ventris)

Clarence Cameron White Twilight (arr. Ventris)

Ruth Gipps Lyric Phantasy

Frederick Delius Violin Sonata No.2 (arr. Tertis)

Violist Rosalind Ventris leads an international career as a soloist and chamber musician, and has given recitals at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Dublin International Chamber Music Festival, Purcell Room, Bozar, Flagey, Slovak Philharmonic, Aldeburgh Festival and Het Concertgebouw. She has performed with orchestras such as the European Union Chamber Orchestra, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Sinfonia Cymru, l’Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie and the Belgian National Orchestra. Rosalind’s debut album (Delphian Records, 2023), featuring music by leading women composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was ‘Instrumental Choice’ in BBC Music Magazine and subsequently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award, and The Sunday Times hailed the recording as ‘rich and illuminating…a uniformly engrossing disc'. She will be performing a solo recital of works from the album at the Wigmore Hall on International Women's Day next year. Highlights of the forthcoming season also include Walton Viola Concerto with the Orchestra of St John's and appearances at the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival.

As a chamber musician, Rosalind frequently performs as part of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective (Associate Ensemble, Wigmore Hall), and Trio Anima. She has collaborated with artists such as Mitsuko Uchida, Llŷr Williams, Tabea Zimmermann, and Nicola Benedetti. She has been invited to perform at prestigious venues and festivals internationally, including the West Cork, Marlboro, Salzburg and Båstad Festivals, IMS Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music, the Auditorium du Louvre, Paris, and the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn. Praised for her ‘beguiling’ (Gramophone) and ‘gorgeously full-bodied playing’ (The Guardian), Rosalind is a professor of Viola at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and, from September 2025, is the Director of Music at the Yehudi Menuhin School. Alongside her husband, she is one of the Artistic Directors of the Cowbridge Music Festival in Wales. She was formerly the Director of Musical Performance and Performance Studies at the University of Oxford.

Tom Poster is a musician whose skills and passions extend well beyond the conventional role of the concert pianist. He has been described as “a marvel, [who] can play anything in any style” (The Herald), “mercurially brilliant” (The Strad), and as having “a beautiful tone that you can sink into like a pile of cushions” (BBC Music).

Tom has performed over forty concertos from Mozart to Ligeti with Aurora Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, China National Symphony, Hallé, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, collaborating with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nicholas Collon, Robin Ticciati and Yan Pascal Tortelier, or sometimes directing from the piano. He has premiered solo, chamber and concertante works by many leading composers, made multiple appearances at the BBC Proms, and his exceptional versatility has put him in great demand at festivals internationally.

Tom is co-founder and artistic director of Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, appointed Associate Ensemble at Wigmore Hall in 2020. With a flexible line-up featuring many of today’s most inspirational musicians, and an ardent commitment to diversity through its creative programming, Kaleidoscope is particularly renowned for its championing of unjustly neglected gems alongside deservedly celebrated classics. Kaleidoscope broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and has enjoyed residencies at the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Lammermuir and Ischia festivals. Its albums for Chandos Records have been shortlisted for BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone awards, while recent performance highlights have included concerts with Hilary Hahn, a debut at the BBC Proms, and two extensive tours of the USA. In 2024, Kaleidoscope was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Award.

During the 2020 lockdown, his #UriPosteJukeBox series with Elena Urioste - featuring Tom as pianist, arranger, multi-instrumentalist, writer, backing dancer and snowman - brought a staggeringly eclectic selection of music to audiences across the world through 88 daily online performances, for which the duo won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Inspiration Award. Their subsequent recording, The Jukebox Album, received glowing reviews and a BBC Music Magazine Award.

Tom has recorded albums for BIS, Champs Hill, Chandos, Decca, NMC, Orchid and Warner Classics, appearing as soloist and in collaboration with Elena Urioste, Alison Balsom, Guy Johnston, the Aronowitz Ensemble, Aurora Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia and London Symphony Orchestra. He regularly features as soloist on film soundtracks, including the Oscar-nominated score for The Theory of Everything. He studied with Joan Havill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and at King’s College, Cambridge. He won First Prize at the Scottish International Piano Competition 2007 and the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition in 2000.

Tom’s compositions and arrangements have been commissioned, performed and recorded by Alison Balsom, Matthew Rose, Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott and Roderick Williams. His chamber opera for puppets, The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak, received an acclaimed three-week run at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2017. He is a lifelong fan of animals with unusual noses.

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