Programme and Notes

Dussek Duo

The Dussek Duo has arrived....two hundred years too late, perhaps, as both instrumentalists are playing French instruments from the turn of the 19th century! However, early keyboard specialist Douglas Hollick and harpist Eleanor Turner are both very much alive and full of zest for the music of the 1800s.

ELEANOR TURNER (Harp)

Eleanor started learning the harp at the age of five, and began her formal musical education at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, studying harp with Daphne Boden and composition with Dr Peter Fribbins. She went on to study harp with Alison Nicholls for seven years and has participated in summer courses with Catherine Michel and Erika Waardenburg. In the summer of 2011, thanks to a prestigious Wingate Scholarship, Eleanor attended the 11th World Harp Congress in Vancouver where she performed in a masterclass with Canadian harpist Judy Loman and composer Raymond Murray Schafer.

Eleanor has won prizes at many national and international competitions, most recently winning second prize in the 2011 International Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition  and Third Prize and the Audience Award at the Dutch International Harp Competition 2010. In 2008 Eleanor received one of the Worshipful Company of Musicians’ Maisie Lewis Awards, which led to her solo Wigmore Hall debut that year. She won First Prize, a £20,000 Salvi concert harp, at the European Harp Competition 2007, as well as the William Mathias Prize and Musicians’ Benevolent Fund Inspire Award for professional development 2011.

The Dussek Duo is one of several partnerships with other musicians - with flautist Lisa Nelsen in Aquilae, ’cellist Rowena Calvert in the Calvert-Turner Duo, and in 4Girls4Harps. In Italy, Eleanor has performed with Quintettango, and last year she performed with the legendary American jazz harpist Deborah Henson-Conant in the Wales International Harp Festival. Eleanor is also a composer, arranger and teacher. She loves travel and enjoys all the opportunities that being a musician presents! www.eleanorturner.com

 DOUGLAS HOLLICK (Pianoforte)

With an international reputation as an organist and harpsichordist, Douglas Hollick studied with Peter Hurford in St Albans, Marie-Claire Alain in Paris and Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. He has played widely both here and abroad, and teaches in Cambridge and at the Birmingham Conservatoire. He has recorded twice for Czech Radio and in 1995 he recorded an organ CD entitled The Young Bach for Supraphon in the Czech Republic which attracted very favourable reviews. Douglas Hollick was awarded a Year 2000 Churchill Fellowship to visit North Germany and Denmark to research the organs and other keyboard instruments from the period of Buxtehude and the young J.S.Bach. Recent years have seen him playing fortepiano as well as organ and harpsichord, complementing his interest in the music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Dussek Duo with harpist Eleanor Turner is one result of this, pairing his 1809 Broadwood grand with an Erard Frères Paris harp of 1820.

He has recorded a CD of the extraordinary harpsichord and organ music of Christophe Moyreau, released on Riverrun Records in 2002 and arousing considerable interest. In August that year Douglas recorded again for Riverrun in Buxtehude’s church of Sct Mariae at Helsingør in Denmark; this recording, called Buxtehude, master and pupil, was released in late 2003 to great critical acclaim. His next CD,  music from the period of the French Revolution for harpsichord, square piano and organ, was launched at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005. The Birmingham Conservatoire has supported much of Douglas’ research, and his latest CD, Music of the Baroque avant-garde for harpsichord and organ, was released in July 2007 as a tribute to Buxtehude in his tercentenary year. For details of his currently available recordings see www.rvrcd.co.uk

Programme