An opportunity to hear work by students on solo performance courses in the School of Music.
Lucy Pullan (clarinet) & Dan Gordon (piano)
Gerald Finzi - Clarinet Concerto
Lucy Pullan is a third year joint honours Music and English student from North Yorkshire. She began playing clarinet around age 8, because she was too small to play saxophone. She has performed in the Sage in Gateshead, as well as going on tour in Germany and Prague and has participated in NYO Inspire days. She achieved her ARSM diploma on clarinet in 2021. As part of her degree, she studies performance on clarinet, her preferred instrument.
Ben Finlay (piano) & Milana Sarukhanyan (voice)
Improvisation on Ukrainian Folk Songs
Ben Finlay is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and conductor based in Leeds, UK. Having studied cello at the Royal Academy of Music, Ben’s expertise ranges from historical performance to premiering new works. Ben is currently studying for a masters in Critical and Experimental Composition at the University of Leeds. His compositional language focuses on integrating live instrumental music with the sound worlds of synthesisers, field recording, and popular electronic music styles. In 2022, Ben began learning the viola da gamba and helped found the Londinium Consort, a group focused on exploring the music of the renaissance period through new eyes.
Milana Sarukhanyan is a classical singer, improviser, and a vocal coach. Her speciality is Bel Canto opera, classical and contemporary vocal repertoire and free improvisation. Her recent performance of Bertha in the Barber of Seville "added to an already silky layer of sound." (Telegraph & Argus). Despite her rich artistic background in opera and chamber vocal repertoire, she is a passionate advocate of free improvisation and experimental staging. As an improviser, Milana has appeared on stages such as: Cafè OTO (London), Nilsson (Düsseldorf), Witzli-Poetzli (Antwerp), and the Hundred Years Gallery (London). In 2022, she became a member of London Improvisers Orchestra.
