Toad Lane Concerts: Duncan Glenday (piano)

Concert pianist Duncan Glenday played at St Mary in the Baum on 27 October

A varied month of top-class concerts at St Mary in the Baum culminated with concert pianist Duncan Glenday on Wednesday 27 October.

Duncan has been playing this very piano at music at lunchtime since its days back at the old Art Gallery when he was in his mid-teens. He subsequently developed the great potential he showed then by graduating first class from the prestigious joint course of the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and Manchester University.

As well as diplomas in professional performance, Duncan's competition successes have included first prizes in the John Ireland Competition (in both Piano Solo and Song Accompaniment) and the Proctor-Gregg Recital Prize.

Duncan Glenday returned to Toad Lane on 27 October to play now as a busy recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and teacher. He has performed over 300 concerts throughout the UK and is currently a tutor of piano at the University of Manchester and also the Founder and Artistic Director of the Uppermill Summer Music Festival, now approaching its sixth season.

The deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s Sonata in C K 309 was delivered in masterly fashion before providing a rare opportunity to hear the whole of Suite Bergamasque by Debussy, with its well-known atmospheric third movement, Clair de Lune. After this sublime playing, we then had fireworks with Chopin’s celebratory ‘Military’ Polonaise in A.

This was an explosive end to a month of sparkly RNCM graduates: October 6 - enchanting harpist Alice Roberts, like Duncan, a post-grad of the RNCM & Manchester University ‘joint course’, and a Procter-Gregg prize winner 2016 and 2018 and RNCM Gold medallist; October 13 - Jonathan Ellis, another joint course alumnus, accompanied soprano Margaret Ferguson who came to the RNCM on a scholarship from Ghana, married and settled here; and October 20 - classical guitarist Richard Haslam who graduated from Hull university before post-graduate study at the RNCM.

Rochdale’s weekly midday music – the Toad Lane Concerts happen every Wednesday at 12.30pm at St Mary in the Baum, Toad Lane, Rochdale, OL16 1DZ. Entrance fee is £6. No refreshments available at the moment, but the venue is Covid-19 secure. Contact 01706 648872 for further information.

Details of future concerts are listed in the Events section of Rochdale Online:

• www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/events/

Dr Joe Dawson