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8
January 2012
9
ARTS
Michaelmas Music
It was the chance of a lifetime when Tim
Davies, watching an open rehearsal of the
National Youth Jazz Orchestra, was plucked
from the audience to join them, impressing
the conductor sufficiently to be invited back to
perform with them that night.
Franklin’s won the House Singing Competition
with a performance of Cee Lo Green’s
Forget
You
conducted by Henry Jenkinson and with
Henry Binning at the piano.
While the New College Choir were on tour, the
Abingdon Chapel Choir, in fine voice under new
director John Cotton, sang Evensong in New
College Chapel on 12 November.
A strings masterclass in November saw world-
renowned violinist Levon Chilingirian work with
six Abingdon violinists, encouraging them to
greater excellence. Later in the month the Joint
Choral Society of Abingdon and St Helen’s
together with members from Our Lady’s
Abingdon gave a disciplined and balanced
performance of Verdi’s
Requiem
.
n
News
Verdi’s Requiem
Drama Festival
The Drama Festival saw Abingdon and St Helen’s
fifth- and sixth-formers perform five plays a night
for three nights in a variety of spaces in the Arts
Centre. The plays were a pared down version
of Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline; One Million Tiny
Plays about Britain
, a series of piercing windows
into other people’s lives;
The Shape of Things
,
one woman’s devastating experiment in shaping
another person’s world;
Cruising
, a seventy-year-
old woman’s search for a partner and
Come
out Eli
, which explores the impact on the local
community of the sixteen-day 2002 Hackney
siege – the longest in British History.
n
Cabaret!
A combined cast from St Helen’s and Abingdon
with Lucy Taylor as the charismatic Sally Bowles,
Will Abell her American boyfriend Clifford
Bradshaw and Toby Marlow as the enigmatic
Emcee, all put in spectacular performances in the
musical Cabaret at St Helen’s at the end of last
term. By turns joyous, poignant and horrifying, the
cast had the audience with them all the way.
n
Abingdon news