Concert Focus: Crash, Bang, Wallop!

You can tell one of our big Crash, Bang, Wallop! family concerts is fast approaching when the CLS office turns into a full time craft production zone! Right now our photocopier is running non-stop, producing brightly coloured musical word searches and colouring sheets and we're busily laminating signs and gathering up percussion instruments for all of our pre-concert activities on Saturday.

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Saturday's concert at Cadogan Hall is based around stories and nursery rhymes, with some pieces written by our very own presenter, James Redwood, and our grand finale will be The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck by Stephen McNeff.  Also on the programme is a brand new piece by a young composer, 17 year old Joaquim (Quim) Badia Arumi. Quim is currently in his final year at the Purcell School for Young Musicians and will next year be continuing his studies at the Royal College of Music. The piece he has written is called Armentier and is written for solo piano and flute with orchestra. 

 

Quim told us: "Armentier was written in August 2010 in a little village called Armentera, in Costa Brava in Spain. It’s a mixture of up-beat music and calm, lyric writing. I wanted to explore the different textures of both the flute and the piano and how they can convey different characters."

Quim

The multi-talented Quim will be playing the solo piano part and will be joined on stage by fellow Purcell School pupil, flautist Charlotte Ashton.  Both Quim and Charlotte are also part of the pupil-led Impulse Outreach group at the Purcell School and have toured the country giving workshops and concerts to schools and communities.    

If you'd like to join us and hear Quim's piece, as well as Jemima Puddleduck and much more, the last few tickets for Saturday's concert are available at the Cadogan Hall box office on 020 7730 4500.

Gillian Hunter

Education Manager

Out of Office: Elaine

This is one of the many new features we’re introducing to our blog over the coming months. First up is Out of Office, where you’ll find out what CLS musicians and staff get up to away from the office and the music.

 

Elaine Baines, our General Manager, tells us about the pressures and parallels of dog showing at the phenomenon that is Crufts.

 

I’m honoured to be owned and managed by a smooth fox terrier called Balengro Woodland Venture – otherwise known as Archie. Saturday morning saw us trotting round Ring 7 at Crufts, the greatest and most exciting dog show in the world.

 

You would be surprised how much orchestra concerts and dog showing have in common! Both require a lot of preparation: you have to be dressed right, know how to behave in the ring, practice one’s moves for hours, keep an eye on the audience (judge), and try and give the performance of your life! And then the dog needs washing, grooming, and persuading to get out of bed at 3am to travel to Birmingham.

 

Archie

Musicians strive for the most perfect interpretation and performance of a work, while dog breeders try for their ideal smooth fox terrier. My ideal smooth terrier would be one that doesn’t try and savage the wheels off every wheelie bin it sees and bite the ankles of men in hi-viz jackets!  In the meantime I’ll have to make do with Archie!

 

Thankfully the fox terrier judge was wearing a dark suit and sober tie so his ankles survived and we got a 4th place in post graduate dog!

 

Elaine Baines

General Manager

CLS on the road: Crash Bang Wallop! in Chatham

Last night we were at the Brook Theatre in Chatham introducing families to the wonderful world of everything brass!

Before the concert started, we made and decorated percussion instruments with all the children, which they used to join in with the musicians for selected pieces.  As always, our Crash Bang Wallop! presenter, James Redwood was full of energy and enthusiasm and got parents, grandparents and children of all ages, singing and playing along with the CLS musicians.

A highlight of the evening was our principal horn player, Steve Stirling’s demonstration of his hose pipe horn, quite literally a garden hose with at £2 plastic funnel on the end, from which he can make a sound, not dissimilar to that of a french horn! The children were invited up on to the stage to hold onto the hose and feel the vibrations while the quintet performed a specially arranged piece for Brass Quartet and Hose Pipe Horn – surely a first in Chatham, if not the world! 

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The concert ended with the Quintet accompanying the audience in a round with original lyrics written by the children (it seems pancakes are still on the mind as the whole song was about how delicious they are!) and a final rousing version of I Wanna Be Like You from The Jungle Book which had everyone upon their feet, bopping along.

Gillian
Education Manager 

Catch our next Crash Bang Wallop! Family Concert at Cadogan Hall on Saturday 26 March @ 12noon

 

L’Chaim – Living Music

This month and next, we're gearing up for one of our longest running outreach programmes, L'Chaim - Living Music

The project has been going for the last 12 years and involves small chamber ensembles visiting Jewish care homes in North London, playing informal recitals and interacting with residents and staff. Throughout February and March a CLS string quartet will visit nine homes, many of which are new additions to the L’Chaim project. 

Residents of the homes are always knowledgeable about classical music, and we usually have people humming along with melodies, from Gershwin to Dvorak, and telling stories of concerts they’ve been to and musicians they’ve known.

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As the years have passed, the set up and management of the homes has changed, and many of the beautiful old homes we’ve been used to visiting on the Bishops Avenue have now closed. Not wanting the project to wind down, we’ve recently developed a partnership with Jewish Care, who manage a large number of homes and community centres for the Jewish community in North London and further afield.

It’s always a pleasure to play to these wonderful and unique audiences, in fact it doesn’t take much to tempt our musicians to stay late for afternoon tea, cakes and chats with the residents and staff.     

Gillian
Education Manager

 

 

 

 

Percy Grainger in Colombia - a first?

Yesterday evening, City of London Sinfonia performed a late night outdoor concert in Plaza San Pedro Claver to an audience of about 2000.  It was also live on Colombian national television.  The programme included music by Rossini, Couperin, Bach, Saint-Saens and Percy Grainger.  In case this was some kind of world premiere of Grainger's orchestral music in Colombia, I made this short video.  (Apologies for the quality of the video).  We've played outdoor concerts in this square on our two previous visits to the Cartagena Festival, but last night was particularly humid (though a little less windy than I remember from before).  Still, the audience reception was enthusiastic which made it all worth while. 

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Cartagena International Music Festival - day 2

Firstly, I must apologize for this post coming so late - if any of you have been following our Tweets or indeed our Posterous promises of many blog updates beginning at the very start of January, you may have been expecting this introductory blog all week! In my defence, we spent two days travelling, then had some technical wifi issues in our Cartagena hotel/rehearsal space, and well, since then, have just been incredibly busy (and having some fun too!).

So to catch you up, the story so far is that we left London very early on Monday morning. All the musicians arrived on time and there were no dramas with the cellos or bass, so all in all, a wonderful start to the tour! We flew direct to Miami, and arrived late Monday afternoon to a hot and sunny Florida evening. That night, a group squeezed into a mini bus (I'm sure we were at least two people over capacity...) which took us to South Beach. A few mojitos on the beach later, the very tired group piled back into the mini bus back to the hotel. 

Tuesday morning we were back to Miami airport for our flight to Cartagena.  Already in the airport queue everyone around us was speaking Spanish and I, for one, quickly realised that my Michel Thomas crash course in beginner Spanish CDs probably weren't going to get me very far in Colombia...

Arriving  in Cartagena on Tuesday evening, we walked out of the plane to incredible heat - around 32 degrees - and beautiful scenery and people, and for us first timers, it hit us how special this tour was going to be.

Wednesday and Thursday have been packed days of rehearsals. The management team have been sorting out various inevitable teething problems with music, schedules, lighting, chairs, etc. And the musicians have been working incredibly hard and are making an absolutely beautiful sound.  There have been many happy reunions of our players with the professional Colombian musicians they have worked with in past years, who are desk sharing with CLS musicians. We've met some of the soloists, who sound incredible, and have been soaking up the friendly, enthusiastic, massively positive atmosphere that surrounds the Cartagena International Music Festival. 

We often talk of the 'CLS Family' which is in essence, I suppose, a feeling which surrounds the orchestra, from the players, to the management, to the board and especially our audiences. Well, here in Cartagena, the CLS family is part of a much larger family which includes musicians and the hugely dedicated staff from all around Colombia.  What an honour it is to be part of this festival and I look forward to sharing with you all of our ups and downs over the coming week and a bit!  I promise some good pictures too, to bring a little bit of sunny Cartagena to London in the winter.

Our first concert is tomorrow evening and we're up bright and early for a dress rehearsal in the theatre, so I'd better get some sleep!

-Gillian     

Opera Holland Park named Best Opera Company of 2010

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City of London Sinfonia is delighted to congratulate Opera Holland Park, which has been named the Best Opera Company 2010 by the Sunday Times Review of the Year.

"Five hits out of six, with excellent stagings of Carmen and Don Giovanni, the most convincing La forza del destino here in decades, and a rare outing for Zandonai's potboiler Francesca da Rimini." 

In the best opera productions of 2010, the Independent on Sunday said: "Conductors Stuart Stratford and Brad Cohen conjured the thrill of La forza del destino and the sorrow of Pelléas et Mélisande in Holland Park."

City of London Sinfonia has been resident orchestra at OHP since 2004 and is very much looking forward to this summer’s festival, which includes favourites such as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Verdi’s Rigoletto along with lesser-known gems such as Catalani’s La Wally. For more information and to book please visit the Opera Holland Park website.

 

Beating the winter blues

Last week, CLS musicians made two very special visits to brighten the days of patients at the Royal London Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital.

At the Royal London, CLS has partnered with Vital Arts, the arts organisation for Barts and The London NHS Trust, which delivers arts projects for the well-being of patients, staff and the wider hospital community.  So far, we have had four sessions, working on two elderly wards of the hospital, with two CLS musicians playing for patients in their beds. Our last session, on Wednesday of last week, featured Christmas favourites and war-time songs including Lambeth Walk, It's a Long Way to Tipperary and We'll Meet Again. The session was almost cut short, due to one of the wards being closed to visitors because of a sickness bug, but we improvised and spent the remaining time in two of the hospital's waiting areas. This proved to be a great success, spreading the Christmas cheer far beyond the two wards we planned to visit.  The success of our final session means that we will be be continuing the partnership with Vital Arts in 2011, planning a series of visits to provide music in hospital waiting areas and the elderly wards.

Our weekly session at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) had a special Christmas feel for the end of term last week. We've been working with the Hospital School at GOSH for the past 12 years, and currently two musicians visit the wards and the school every Thursday during term time. Last week, children in the Hospital's Activity Centre created their own Christmas rap, with the help of CLS musicians and some stellar percussion playing by nurses and teaching assistants.  From January we will be spending more time on the wards,reaching more children and their families who always welcome the distraction and smiling faces of our musicians.   

Wishing you all a safe and happy holiday season. Look out for lots of updates in early January from the Cartagena International Music Festival in Colombia.

-Gillian, CLS Education Manager