Pittville Pump Room
Cheltenham Spa
10 June, 2025
Tsukushi Mitsuda is studying at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where she now lives. She was born in Japan in March 2003. She began learning violin at the age of three and piano at four. She attended the Omi Brotherhood Junior High School in Omihachiman City, where she played piano and organ to accompany the choir.
Her family moved to the UK in April 2017 and she attended Cheltenham Bournside school, where she won the senior award in its Young Musician of the Year competition in 2019. She gave her first recital in Cheltenham in 2018. Since then she has performed at venues including Pittville Pump Room, Chapel Arts and Buxton United Reformed Church. During the pandemic, she recorded a performance at Holst’s birthplace. In 2024 she played in the pre-concert performance for the BBC Philharmonic at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester.
Her classical repertoire extends from the Baroque to the 20th Century, and she also enjoys jazz. Since joining the RNCM, she has taken up chamber music and starts her Masters degree in September. Her bears (pictured below) are called Latte, Dmitri and Mocha.
TODAY’S MUSIC
Johann Sebastian Bach (arr. M.Hess)
‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ from Cantata BWV147
Ludwig van Beethoven
‘Eroica Variations’
Dmitri Shostakovich
Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op.87 No. 4
Frédéric Chopin
‘Waltz Brillante’ Op.34 No.1
Maurice Ravel
Sonatine
I. Modéré
II. Mouvement de menuet
III. Animé
Mikhail Glinka (arr. Mily Balakirev)
‘Do Not Say’
About the music
ABOUT THE MUSIC
‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ is the usual English title for the chorale from a 1723 Advent cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1850). This piano version was made by Myra Hess in 1926. She organised 1,698 lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery in London during WWII, even throughout the Blitz, later becoming Dame Myra. When sung in English, the words are by Robert Bridges (Poet Laureate 1913–1930).
The ‘Eroica Variations’ by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are more correctly known as the Variations and Fugue for Piano in E♭ major, Op. 35. The theme was a favourite of the composer’s. He used it in his ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus, then in this piano piece of 1802, and only after that in his Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’, composed the following year.
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) was the most prominent composer of the Soviet Union from the 1920s through to his death, repeatedly falling in and out of favour. Sent to Leipzig in 1950 to judge a piano competition on the bicentennial of J.S. Bach’s birth, he met 26-year-old Tatiana Nikolayeva from Moscow, who was primed to play any of the preludes and fugues from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. He decided to write a similar cycle for her. His 24 Preludes and Fugues, one for each major and minor key in chromatic scale, were completed in five months. This one, in E minor, has no break between prelude and fugue.
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) wrote many waltzes. This one is from a set composed in 1834 and published as Grandes Valses Brillantes. It was dedicated to Josefina von Thun-Hohenstein, a princess he taught at her castle in Bohemia.
The Sonatine by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was written for a 1903 magazine competition with a prize of 100 francs. He submitted it ‘par Verla’, an anagram of his name, and didn’t win.
The final piece, by Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857), was composed in 1834 as a song, using love-lorn words by Anton Delvig. It is also known as ‘Do Not Say Love Passes Away’.Glinka is known as ‘the fountainhead of Russian music’. Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) led the legendary ‘Five’ or ‘Mighty Handful’ of composers: the others were Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Borodin.
Here are the instructions on how to make it.
And here’s the whole Robert J. Lang book, which I got from the Internet Archive.
Preserve the Commons!
THE CHELTENHAM MUSIC SOCIETY
Cheltenham Music Festival Society’s free Young Musician Concerts take place on Tuesdays at 13:00 in this Cheltenham Trust building. There is a voluntary collection for the travel expenses of the performers and to pay for the venue. Programme by John Morrish. Origami duck from The Complete Book of Origami by Robert J. Lang, Dover Publications, New York 1988.
FORTHCOMING ATTRACTIONS
17 June Cheltenham College
24 June Vitaly Pisarenko (piano)