13 March 2019

This year’s fourth Scholars’ Concert featured a varied and exciting programme. The concert comprised some 25 solo performances from a wide range of instrumentalists including pianists, woodwind, strings and brass. This event demonstrated that there is certainly no shortage of solo musical talent at Abingdon School.

We heard some fine piano performances from Joe Bradley (Haydn), James Deng (Haydn), Tristan Mann Powter (Brahms) and Harry Pan (Peixun Chen). All the boys played with much aplomb and Tristan and Harry managed to use this opportunity to obtain a solid recording of their performances for their GCSE Music performance assessment.

We had several woodwind players drawn from across the range of the school. Can Tugcetin (Lower School) offered a wonderful rendition of the 3rd movement of Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, whilst Luc Tucker (4th year) and James Ashby (Upper Sixth) performed Hess and Elgar respectively with some real flair. We heard three oboe performances from Oliver Glover (Saint-Saens), Scott Yap (Fauré) and Cameron Yu (Hofman) and two clarinet performances from James Tuffill (Grovlez) and Olly Elly (Stamitz). Raffy Armon-Jones offered a single, but very accomplished performance of Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina for Flute. A single brass performance, Laurence Peverall (trumpet) with a lively rendition of Gregson’s Dance Macabre, was a welcome addition to the first half of the concert. It was rewarding to see a number of boys who no longer study music academically continuing to engage with musical performance.

We were also treated to strings performances, across a similarly wide range of year groups. Thomas Wilson (1st year) offered a lovely rendition of the first two movement of the Telemann Cello Sonata, whilst Alex Glover (Lower Sixth) impressed with a mature performance of the second movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto. Rory Kind, Timmy Chiu and Jonathan Pannett-Smith similarly impressed on the violin with performances of Danca, Böhm and a traditional Russian Song, Black Eyes, before Aidan Chan and Oliver Glover offered lively cello performances of Fauré and Klengel respectively.

This was a most enjoyable concert – our thanks to all the boys and their inspiring accompanists, Lynette Stulting, Mariette Pringle and Chris Fletcher-Campbell whose work with the boys encompasses so much more than the performances in the concert this evening. 

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