Sunday Lunchtime Classical Music With Volo Trio – Sun 24th Apr

Doors 11.30am. Start 12pm. Adv ticket £10. OTD ticket £12.

A new set of classical music series with amazing international talent that brings professional classical music on your doorstep. Come and be inspired by wonderful live music: classics, new accessible works and family favourites.

Volo Trio –  Nightingales and Fairytales

Claudia Alvarez-Calderon – soprano; Alex Wilson – piano; Ruth Molins – flute.

Programme includes music by: Chopin, Delibes, Will Carnell, Gordon Jacob.

Volo Trio are coloratura soprano Claudia Alvarez Calderon, beautifully evocative flautist Ruth Molins and award-winning pianist Alex Wilson. The word volo means flight in Italian, and their performances are inspired by birds and flights of imagination. Audiences describe them as stunning; really beautiful; truly the stuff of fairytales: enchanting, magic and wonderful and amazingly talented.

The programme Nightingales and Fairytales offers the listener a melodious escape into a world of stories and birds, some familiar and some unusual, as well as regional poetry set to new music by local composer Will Carnell, commissioned for the Volo Trio.

Claudia Alvarez Calderon is a Peruvian-Italian coloratura soprano who trained in Lima, Rome, Pesaro and New York and regularly performs in the UK, Italy and her native Lima as a recitalist and opera soloist. She has performed in venues such as Rome Opera House, St Anna in Vatican City, St George in Milan and regularly tours with the Italian opera company Gli Amici di Fritz.

Now based on Dartmoor, Claudia also maintains an active singing schedule in Devon and collaborates with local musicians. She has sung live at BBC Radio Devon, for Dart Music Festival and toured village halls with Diva on your Doorstep, an initiative to make opera accessible by bringing it to smaller communities.

Alex Wilson is a versatile pianist with interests ranging from cutting edge new music to fascinating repertoire by forgotten composers. Alex is a former British Contemporary Piano Competition finalist, Park Lane Group Young Artist and performer of new music across Britain and Europe as soloist, accompanist and chamber musician. His self-curated tour of music by the lost composers of World War One has achieved large audiences and received critical praise.

Alex’s debut solo CD – a recording of works by WW1 composer F.S.Kelly – was released in spring 2020 to critical acclaim with a launch performance in Southwark Cathedral. Alex believes strongly in taking professional, ambitious music projects out of the big cities and loves working with musicians from across the South West. Alex teaches piano at Colyton Grammar School.

Ruth Molins is a founding member of Flute Cake, Marsyas Quartet, Zephyr Duo, Volo Trio and part of the collective A Quiet Night In. Devon-born, she believes in the value of high quality, professional music within the local community. She performed as a soloist with Exeter Symphony Orchestra in 2012 (Rutter, Suite Antique) and again in 2015 (Mozart, Concerto for Flute and Harp). She has been featured on Phonic FM, Soundart Radio, BBC Radio Devon and BBC Radio 3.

In 2019 she curated and performed the Flute@37 concerts, a series of intimate performances given from her own music studio. During the 2020 lockdown, she gave live-streamed performances of Les Chants de Nectaire by Charles Koechlin, connecting weekly with listeners world-wide. In 2017 her composition, Make Room was performed at Waterstones, The Glorious Art House and Studio 36 in Exeter. Ruth teaches flute at Exeter School and privately. In 2021, Ruth was invited by Pearl flutes artist, Elizabeth Walker, to record a performance video with practice tips, as part of the Furstenau Challenge project.