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October 2005
St John's Smith Square , London
In 2004, the English Schools’ Orchestra and Choir celebrated ten years of fine music-making with a gala birthday concert in the Barbican concert hall. This year in October, in the smaller but beautiful venue of St John’s, Smith Square, the orchestra and choir of 2005 gave the first concert of the second decade, performing music by Butterworth, Rutter and Brahms.
As in previous years the orchestra, drawn from schools all over the country, rehearsed in the splendid Music School of the Haberdashers’Aske’s Boys’ School at Elstree in Hertfordshire and gradually came to terms with an appropriately taxing programme. For five days prior to the concert, section rehearsals with experienced professional tutors and full rehearsals under musical director Robert Pepper gradually bore fruit and the initial extremely challenging technicaldifficulties posed especially by Brahms in his first Symphony, but also by Butterworth in the rhapsody for orchestra “A Shropshire Lad”, and John Rutter in his popular “Gloria” for choir and orchestra, gradually began to seem less daunting. Soon the music was being played with ever increasing confidence by all sections of the 70-strong orchestra. With technical difficulties well and truly conquered, musical interpretation blossomed and continued to develop at a fast pace, so that by concert day confident and mature musical performances were achieved which belied the youthful ages of the players and singers. It is worth stressing that players and singers on English Schools’courses are selected on proven achievement and teacher recommendation - but without individual audition. Without compromising the expected high performance standards, this policy has always proved popular and has given many young people great opportunities to exercise their impressive musical abilities.
Of necessity, the choir this year was smaller than in 2004 due to the confines of the stage dimensions at St John’s. Nevertheless something approaching a hundred singers from five school choirs coped well with the exuberantly syncopated rhythms and strong climaxes of John Rutter’s setting of the Gloria and more than held their own against some powerful playing provided by the brass, percussion and organ accompaniment.
The report of last year’s tenth birthday concert concluded with the words, “The members of this year’s course, like their predecessors, will have worked very hard to prepare today’s music under their instrumental tutors, choir directors and of course their conductor and musical director, Robert Pepper. We look to the future with considerable optimism”. Those sentiments apply equally this year. The 2005 course was again a happy one and the concert fulfilled all expectations with fine performances of all the works. There is no doubt that the 170 young people, who this year gave up a large part of their autumn half-term holiday to prepare and perform music to such a high standard, showed that the musical excellence of the English Schools’ Orchestra and Choir continues undiminished. The appreciative audience at St John’s on Saturday 29th October was well aware that optimism for the future is fully justified.
Alan Taylor,
Course Director, English Schools Orchestra and Choir