1 February 2017
Our concert tonight gave us the opportunity to hear some excellent performances from our senior musicians across a range of solo instruments. It was particularly good to hear some of our new award holders in action, including violinists, Nicholas Raptakis and Ashwin Tennant (3rd Year), and Jonathan Pannett-Smith (1st Year). The standard throughout the evening was outstanding.
The concert enabled us to make some initial performance recordings for this year’s cohort of GCSE musicians. We heard some lovely piano playing from Andy Zhang (Scarlatti), Charles Hall (Mendelssohn), Oliver Breach (Gershwin), Tobias White (Villa Lobos) and Didier Delgorge and Harris Ma (Debussy).
Our singers included Martin Man and Oliver Dickson. Both chose classic songs from musicals – from Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific (Some Enchanted Evening) and Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady (On the Street Where You Live). Both sang with panache and great commitment.
Two wind players included Fifth Year, Mohsen Ansari, with the slow movement of Haydn’s trumpet concerto and Tom Preston with Saint-Saens’ bassoon sonata, first movement.
We heard five outstanding string performances this evening. The first was from new music scholar, Ashwin Tennant, playing Novacek’s virtuosic Moto Perpetuo. This was followed by 1st year, Jonathan Pannett-Smith, with Kodaly’s Intermezzo from Hary Janos, which he played with great character. Nicholas Raptakis performed a movement from a beautiful and challenging Bach sonata, Alexander Lawrence Elgar’s lyrical Idyll and Fergal Marsh in an arresting and energetic performance of Bohm’s Introduction and Polonaise.
Our thanks must go to all tonight’s performers, together with their teachers and tonight’s accompanists, Mariette Pringle and Lynette Stulting.
