Watch Lydia Kavina Play Without Touching!
One of the world’s leading exponents, Lydia Kavina, will be appearing at The Players Theatre, Thame on Friday 29th July to play the extraordinary electronic instrument known as a theremin. It’s extraordinary because it is played without being touched by the human hand. If you’ve never come across it before, you’ve almost certainly heard it, because it is played in the title music of the long-running ITV detective series Midsomer Murders, as well as in film scores, notably Miklós Rózsa's soundtrack for Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, and Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The theremin is the granddaddy of weird instruments: one of the world’s first electronic instruments, it was invented by Leon Theremin, a young Russian physicist, as long ago as 1920. Using electronics specifically to create music, it is notable for its eerie sound and contact-less playing technique.
Lydia will take us on a journey through the theremin’s repertoire accompanied by the virtuoso pianist Maki Sekiya. The concert, being held in association with Thame Museum, will include classics by composers such as Bach, Dvorak and Gershwin, as well as film music including The Day the Earth Stood Still, and contemporary compositions including Lydia’s own. Naturally, she will also be playing the Midsomer Murders theme tune!
Midsomer Murders marks its 25th anniversary in 2022. To complement the concert and a current exhibition on The Making of Midsomer at Thame Museum, Tony Long, the author of A Midsomer Day Out and a Thame Midsomer tour guide, will give a fascinating talk on the history of Midsomer Murders and Thame’s involvement in its filming. He will cover the origins of the show and how it has developed over the last 25 years, highlighting locations where filming has taken place in and around Thame, with some amusing anecdotes.
This is an unmissable concert! As Michael Beckerman said in The New York Times, “To see a thereminist of Ms Kavina’s quality seemingly pluck notes out of the air is one of the great performance experiences available to us”.
