At 7.30pm
Conversations with Bach
Text - Eva Hoffman
Poems - George Szirtes
Violin - Krysia Osostowicz
Cello - Miguel Angel Villeda Ceron
Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, before emigrating aged 13
to Vancouver, recounted in her acclaimed memoir Lost in Translation.
After a PhD in Literature from Harvard, she worked as a senior editor
and cultural critic at The New York Times, and has taught at various
British and American universities. Her other books include Exit Into
History, After Such Knowledge and Time, as well as two novels, The
Secret and Illuminations. She has made numerous programmes for
BBC radio. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship and the
American Academy of Arts' Whiting Award for Writing. She is currently
a Visiting Professor at the European Institute at UCL.
A child refugee from Hungary in 1956, George Szirtes lives in the UK
and published his first book of poems, The Slant Door, in 1979. It won
the Faber Prize. He has published many since then; his collection,
Reel, winning the T S Elliot Prize in 2004, for which he has been twice
shortlisted since. His latest collection of poetry is Mapping the Delta
(2016). He has also won many international prizes for his own poetry
and for his translations from Hungarian, including the Man Booker
International Translation Prize. His second book for children, In the
Land of the Giants won the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education
Prize for the best book of poems for children in 2012. His memoir of
his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen, recieved great critical
acclaim and was serialised on BBC R3. George was recently a
featured guest on Michael Berkeley's Private Passions.
Krysia Osostowicz studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School, at
Cambridge and in Salzburg with the great Hungarian violinist Sándor
Végh. She was a founder of the pioneering piano quartet Domus,
which travelled the world with its own portable concert hall, a geodesic
dome. In 1995 she founded and led for 25 years the Dante Quartet,
recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber Music
in 2012. Krysia is much in demand as a teacher of violin and chamber
music at the Guildhall School of music, and is also artistic director of
the thriving Dante Summer Festial in Cornwall. She has performed
throughout Europe and made many award-winning recordings,
including the sonatas of Bartók, Brahms and Ravel, and the string
quartets of Debussy, Janácek and Kodály. In 2021 she was invited to
lead the world-renowned Brodsky Quartet, a role she has taken up
with great relish.
"Performances of flawless integrity and insight" - BBC Music Magazine
Miguel Angel Villeda Ceron started learning the cello when he was 4
years old. Having been acknowledged as a child prodigy by the
Mexican Secretariat of Education at the age of 10, he went on to play
most of the major cello repertoire as a soloist with major orchestras in
Mexico, Latin America and the USA, such as The Orlando
Philharmonic Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónia de Jalisco, and many
others. His first CD, released this year, is of Arturo Marquez's cello
concerto, at the invitation of the composer. In addition to his promising
career as a soloist, Miguel Angel is the youngest member and Princip
Cellist in the National Sympony Orchestra of Mexico. He is also a
passionate chamber musician. In September 2020 he was awarded
sholarships to study for a post-graduate degree at Trinity Laban
College of Music in London.