Dear Clare Hall members and friends,

Please find below a list of events taking place this week and beyond, to which you are warmly invited.

Dates for your Diary

28 July 2024 at 7:30pm (This Sunday!)
Musings on Love and Longing: Art Song Re-imagined

Join us for a captivating harp and voice concert by the daughter mother duo, Eleanor Medcalf and Susan Gritton. They will be performing at Clare Hall on the 28th of July, at 7:30pm, and the programme features a wonderful selection of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Britten, and more. Tickets start at only £5, and can be purchased on Eventbrite.

Harpist, soprano and pianist Eleanor Medcalf attended the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music and was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain for two years, most notably as Principal Harpist under Marin Alsop in Bernstein’s Mass at the Royal Festival Hall. Since then she has performed in many major venues throughout the UK including the Royal Albert Hall, Snape Maltings, Symphony Hall Birmingham and the Bridgewater Hall Manchester under conductors such as Sir Mark Elder, John Wilson and Sian Edwards. Eleanor will take up a scholarship to study her Masters in harp performance at the Guildhall School of Music commencing in September 2024.

Winner of the 1994 Kathleen Ferrier Award and Grammy-nominated artist, British soprano Susan Gritton has performed in concert, recital and opera on many of the world’s major stages. Highlights include Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes at La Scala Milan and Opera Australia; Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at Bolshoi; Countess Madeleine in Strauss’ Capriccio at Grange Park; Blanche in Poulenc’s Les Dialogues des Carmelites at Bayerisches Staatsoper, and title roles at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, English National Opera and in Munich. Other career highlights have included Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem, Ravel L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Bach Johannespassion with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle; Handel’s Theodora with Paul McCreesh; Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Carnegie Hall with Sir Roger Norrington; Britten Les Illuminations with BBC Scottish Symphony and Martyn Brabbins, and Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony with London Symphony Orchestra and Richard Hickox.

17 July – 18 September 2024 at 6pm
Clare Hall Summer Seminars

We are delighted to invite you to the 2024 Clare Hall Summer Seminar Series. This is an opportunity for Clare Hall Fellows, Visiting Fellows and Life Members to share topics of their research with the Clare Hall audience. This event will take place in the Clare Hall Meeting Room from 6 to 7 pm right before Wednesday Formal Halls. Each talk will last about 20 minutes followed by comments and questions amidst drinks.  The Summer Seminar Series has been organised by Li Tang. The full list of speakers can be found here.

The next speaker on the 31 July is Prof Jin Sun (Central University of Finance and Economics, China; Clare Hall Visiting Fellow), speaking on ‘Green Trade Finance and Carbon Emission of Chinese Export Companies.’

20-21 July and 27-28 July 2024, from 10am to 5pm
Cambridge Open Studios art exhibition by Fiona Blake

Clare Hall Fellow Commoner and Art Committee Secretary Fiona Blake will be hosting an exhibition as part of the Cambridge Open Studios event, an opportunity to visit working studios and buy art directly from the artists. All Clare Hall members are warmly invited to attend! The exhibition will run on the 20-21 July and 27-28 July, from 10am to 5pm.

Fiona’s paintings feature images of urban landscapes abstracted through the ancient glass of church windows. The scenes become dreamlike, lyrical and mysterious. Read more on Fiona’s website.

Address: Studio 67, The Lauro Building, 67 Aberdeen Avenue, Cambridge, CB2 8DL

Turn left at the island and press the entry button for 67 at the back of the Lauro Building. Parking available.

28 September 2024 from 11am-12pm
Alumni Festival: An AI assistant for football tactics

The Alumni Festival is a weekend of discovery, intellectual adventure and reconnection. Rediscover your connection with this remarkable city as you hear the latest insights from some of Cambridge’s leading academics. Explore their current research through a collection of talks, panel discussions and tours, and learn how your fellow alumni are pioneering solutions to global challenges.

As part of the festival, Clare Hall Associate Dr Petar Velickovic will be giving a talk in the Richard Eden Suite on using AI for football tactics.

Abstract: Identifying key patterns of tactics implemented by rival teams, and developing effective responses, lies at the heart of modern football. However, doing so algorithmically remains an open research challenge.

To address this unmet need, we propose TacticAI, an AI football tactics assistant developed and evaluated in close collaboration with domain experts from Liverpool FC. We focus on analysing corner kicks, as they offer coaches the most direct opportunities for interventions and improvements. TacticAI incorporates both a predictive and a generative component, allowing the coaches to effectively sample and explore alternative player setups for each corner kick routine and to select those with the highest predicted likelihood of success. We validate TacticAI on a number of relevant benchmark tasks: predicting receivers and shot attempts and recommending player position adjustments. The utility of TacticAI is validated by aqualitative study conducted with football domain experts at Liverpool FC. We show that TacticAI’s model suggestions are not only indistinguishable from realtactics, but also favoured over existing tactics 90% of the time, and that TacticAI offers an effective corner kick retrieval system. TacticAI achieves these results despite the limited availability of gold-standard data, achieving data efficiency through geometric deep learning.

Book your place here.

Current Exhibitions

17 July to 22 August 2024
Ink’s Infinite Inspiration: Chinese brush painting by Lu Zhongjian

Clare Hall is delighted to present an exhibition of paintings by Lu Zhongjian. The exhibition is free, and runs from 17 July to 22 August 2024 in Clare Hall’s Main Building.

Lu Zhongjian (卢中见) is an artist of critical acclaim who lives in Guangdong Province in southern China. Born in 1961 in Luoyang, China, he has been fascinated by the beauty of the countryside from a young age and deeply inspired by the rich history of his birthplace. He went on to learn a combination of Chinese and Western art, the latter through the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Lu Zhongjian is a master of many styles and engages with a broad range of themes, from highly meticulous and detailed bird-and-flower paintings to bold and expressive splashed-ink landscapes and magnificent large-scale figure paintings. While his life and work are deeply rooted in Chinese culture, Lu Zhongjian also takes inspiration from Western art and is highly innovative in developing his own unique style.

He has won many awards and accolades over his long and accomplished career, including the Gold Medal of the First Chinese Painting Exhibition of Guangdong Province and the Gold Medal of Galaxy Award by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China. He has been invited to exhibit and deliver talks within China and internationally, in places such as Hong Kong and Macao (China), La Réunion (France), Cambridge (UK), Kuala Lumpur and Penang (Malaysia) and Singapore.

Ongoing
The Bell Collection of British Studio Pottery, 1920-1980

A rotating display of some 320 pieces of studio ceramics. Learn more at https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/bellcollection/

Activities and Societies

Monday 5 August, 8pm in the Meeting Room
Clare Hall Book Club

Join the College’s Book Club for their next meeting, where they will be reading Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.

All College members are welcome to attend in-person, meeting in Clare Hall’s Meeting Room, or via Zoom. If you are not on the mailing list and would like to be, please send an email to gloria.carnevali@icloud.com, confirming your Clare Hall connection and putting the following as the email title: I would like to join the Book Club mailing list.

10 April – 25 September 2024 at 12:15pm
Lunchtime Yoga Sessions

We are delighted to host regular lunchtime yoga sessions on Wednesdays in the Richard Eden Suite, starting from 10 April, from 12:15-12:45pm. Sessions will continue through the summer, read more and sign up here.

8 July – 16 September 2024 at 12:15pm
Lunchtime Pilates Sessions

We are delighted to host lunchtime Pilates classes during the summer. Pilates is a form of low-impact exercise that aims to strengthen muscles while improving postural alignment and flexibility. The sessions will be held on Mondays from 12:15-13:00 (see below for exact locations and dates). Please bring your own mat, and arrive 5-10 minutes early to help prepare the room.

We have added a few additional classes in July, check out the full list of dates and the link to sign up on this page.

Various Dates
Choir Practice

A reminder that Clare Hall Choir practice takes place in Robinson College Chapel every Monday (in term-time, but not always restricted to the official Cambridge term dates) from 7:30-9pm. New members are always welcome, and no previous singing or musical experience is necessary. The only requirement is that you want to sing and have fun doing it! If you are interested in joining, please email Ben de Souza, the Choir’s Director, who is a Clare Hall Associate, freelance choral conductor and accordionist: bd402@cam.ac.uk.

Recent recordings of the choir can also be found on our YouTube channel.

Find a full range of events at https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/events