AN exceptional evening! On Friday, April 29th many TS ensembles took to the chapel for this year’s Concerto Concert. The evening featured many of our talented students, performing a varied and challenging repertoire.
The wind band, inspired by the recent workshop with the Band of the Royal Marines, opened the evening with a bang. They first performed Rimsky Korsakov’s Procession of the Nobles captivating the audience with the driving melody before the first featured item was introduced by the Saxophone Quartet.
Liza by George Gershwin, and later Slip Reel by Cathrine Evison were both projected with style providing an interesting interpretation for Emily Buckland’s GCSE performance submission. Good luck Emily!
Following this, the wind band chose to perform a lesser known item by Rimsky Korsakov featuring Toby Topp on clarinet. Here Toby performed the Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Band highlighting Korsakov’s romantic melodies.
The next featured item again showcased the many talents of Toby Topp, Clarinet, and Hera Bradley, Cello, performing the Brahms Clarinet trio with Tim Waller on piano. This performance of such serious music drew attention to our students and their ability to quickly adapt to the differing styles of each composer.
When the Orchestra took to the stage it was wonderful to see students from across the whole school on the edge of their seats in anticipation. Their excitement was marvellously displayed in Bizet’s Farandole before Hera Bradley quickly tugged at our heart strings with Ernest Bloch’s beautiful Prayer for Solo Cello. The orchestra finished their set by amazing the audience with an exciting performance of Schubert’s Symphony No.8.
The second half of the evening saw the Advanced Vocal Ensemble led by Fiona Baker perform Mendelssohn’s Laudate Pueri, and Joyful, Joyful arranged by Mervyn Warren transformed the choir from a classical setting into a foot tapping gospel rewrite of Beethoven’s iconic theme ‘Ode to joy’.
The final trio feature followed with a buzz still flowing through the audience from AVE. This item saw Amy and Daniel Lloyd-Jones perform with such maturity and aplomb they received quite exceptional comments following the concert. Well done to both Amy and Daniel in your rendition of Madeline Dring’s Trio for flute, oboe and piano!
After this wonderful trio had departed it was left to David Bridges and the Chapel Choir to give even more. Their performance of Ola Gjeilo’s Evening Prayer introduced Alto Saxophonist, Ross Conquer, to the choir performing an improvisatory solo in a more modern and inspiring turn to our programme.
All good things of course have to come to and end, but not until the Dance Band have their say. With such serious and detailed music flowing throughout the evening the finale brought the audience back to a little light jazz. Foot tapping their way through the speedy Salt Peanuts the Dance Band introduced a vocal set to round off a great evening, first with Emily Bosworth performing the Look of Love and finally Straighten Up and Fly Right sung by Upper Sixth music students Harry Acton, Rosemary Moss and Heidi Parsons.
As the TS music school have previously shown, they cannot resist the opportunity to do something extravagant. This concert was no different, with concertos, symphonies and other large scale works, yet again our audience were left awestruck.
Well done to all the students who worked so hard to perform in this concert!
James Butterworth-Smith
