Programming Clara Wieck-Schumann's Compositions - A Lecture-Recital

Due to illness, this event has been postponed. The event will now take place on Monday 1 August at 6pm.

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Westminster Music Library welcomes Ning Hui See from Royal College of Music for a free evening event. Ning Hui will teach audience members about Clara Wieck-Schumann's Piano Sonata in G minor, and more generally, about issues of gender and the musical canon. Ning Hui will incorporate live performance into her talk, allowing audience members to hear the music being discussed.

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Clara Wieck-Schumann's Piano Sonata in G minor (1841-42) presents a confluence of conflicting trajectories. Published 150 years after its composition, it belongs to a large-scale genre regarded as ‘masculine’, ‘intellectual’, and ‘transcendental’.

A professional woman socialised into a male-dominated culture, Wieck-Schumann attracts studies reflecting two centuries of entangled gender, national, and social class ideologies. Posthumous reception evolved from recognising her as a woman achiever, to re-assessing her self-ambivalence and focusing on her creative individuality . The few studies of her Sonata focus on evaluation, amidst broader discourse on the positioning of women composers in the musical canon. However, scholars have focused on philosophy (or musicological considerations) rather than action.

As classical music institutions address issues of privilege and representation, a better understanding of the reasons and processes behind concert programming is necessary to achieve meaningful inclusivity. In this combined concert & talk, Ning Hui will share findings of her ground-breaking research into programming Clara Schumann's works, and perform some of this repertoire live.

Ning Hui See is a pianist and researcher recognised for her "refined touch, voluminous sound and an all-rounded musical personality" (The Straits Times). Ning Hui’s doctoral research 'Concert Programming Strategies: Clara Wieck-Schumann’s Piano Sonata' examines issues of gender, value and the musical canon. She is passionate about the meaningful integration of non-canonical composers into classical music concerts and education. She is supervised by Dr Natasha Loges, Dr Rosie Perkins and Danny Driver at the Royal College of Music London, with the support of a C H Scholarship. She has presented at conferences for the European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (AEC), UniArts Helsinki (Sibelius Academy), and the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research (Surrey). Ning Hui is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant for historical studies at the RCM.

Born in 1996 in Singapore, Ning Hui has been based in London since 2012. She has given recitals at the Steinway Hall, Regent Hall, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, St James' Piccadilly, the Old Royal Naval College, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Victoria & Albert Museum and Leighton House Museum. Elsewhere in the UK, she has performed at the Pallant House Gallery, The Venue at the Leeds College of Music, the Wells Cathedral School and the Yehudi Menuhin School. Additional concerts have brought her to Padua and Venice in Italy, the Steinway Gallery in Manila and the Harris Hall at Aspen, Colorado. She performed the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto in Padua and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Danube Orchestra in Budapest. Over the years, her homecoming concerts at the Esplanade Recital Studio in Singapore have been lauded for her passion, her sound and her mastery of various styles. Ning Hui has been featured on BBC Four, BBC Radio 3 and Symphony 92.4FM. She is an artist with Kris Foundation.

Ning Hui is a laureate of the "Citta di Padova" International Competition in Italy, the Cesar Franck International Piano Competition in Belgium, the RCM Esther Fisher Prize and the MMSF Mark James Piano Award. She was a 2014 BBC Young Musician keyboard finalist and the Grand Prize Winner at the 2012 Singapore Steinway Youth Competition. Masterclasses with Barry Douglas, Martino Tirimo, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Sofya Gulyak, Arie Vardi, Yoheved Kaplinsky and Peter Donohoe have additionally inspired her artistry. Ning Hui attained her MMus and BMus (Hons) with Distinction and First Class studying with John Byrne and Dmitri Alexeev. She received her PGAD with Distinction studying with Deniz Gelenbe and Sergio de Simone at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

Founded in 1948, Westminster Music Library holds one of the largest public collections of sheet music and music books in the UK. We are part of the Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea BiBorough Library Service, and our materials are free to use and borrow.

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This event is part of a collection of talks, recitals, and workshops at the library, designed to encourage exploration of music in new ways.

Whether you are an absolute beginner with no musical background, or a professional musician wishing to learn more, all are warmly welcomed for these sessions.

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