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Moira Bennett casts her perceptive, wry and amused eye over a
childhood and adolescence in South Africa and her years raising
sponsorship for the Aldeburgh Festival, the Barbican Centre and the
London Symphony Orchestra. In her early fifties, Moira Bennett was
widowed with a school-age son and in need of a job. With virtually
no previous working experience but full of energy and
determination, she found herself working at the Britten-Pears
Schoolat Snape, helping to run masterclasses for young professional
musicians studying with artists such as Peter Pears, Galina
Vishnevskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich, Hugues Cuenod and William
Pleeth. Her gift for arts administration - understanding the needs
of performers and audiences - was soon to become highly valued at
Aldeburgh, as she became the Registrar at the Britten-Pears School
and went on to create the post of Development Director in the early
days ofcommercial sponsorship of the arts. She was later invited to
take on a similar role at the Barbican Centre, supporting a series
of international arts festivals, before going on to work with the
London Symphony Orchestra. In 2012 the Bittern Press published
Moira Bennett's history of the Britten-Pears School, Making
Musicians, which Classical Music magazine made one its Books of the
Year. Now in her early nineties, Moira Bennett has written an
extraordinary autobiography, casting an astute eye over her
childhood and adolescence in South Africa, the impact of the Second
World War and the Apartheid years on the country, and her second,
'unexpected', life in the arts.
An insider's perspective on forty years of the Britten-Pears
School, generously illustrated and with quotations from the eminent
staff and their students - many of whom are now internationally
famous. Moira Bennett worked at the Britten-Pears School in its
hectic heyday in the 1980s. She charts its forty-year history,
embodying its founders' initial vision of a bridge between
conservatory and career for gifted young musicians,from ad hoc
classes in a grainstore at Snape, to an annual calendar of non-stop
courses for singers, string players and ensembles in its own
building and fully staged operas in the Maltings, to its current
incarnation as the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. Some of
the most eminent teachers from Europe, the United States and beyond
have come to teach at Snape. These include founder-director Peter
Pears, Hans Hotter, Joan Sutherland, Galina Vishnevskaya,
Jacqueline du Pre, Mitsuko Uchida, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ton
Koopman, and members of the Amadeus Quartet. This authoritative and
anecdotal historical survey of the work of the School is generously
illustrated and studded withquotations from many faculty members
and former students.
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