Music The Music Department has spent much of this year developing new and exciting ways to rehearse and perform. In place of our normal programme of evening concerts, we developed year group bubble lunchtime concerts, which quickly became a highlight of each week. While friends from each year group were able to form an audience, the concerts were also recorded so that the wider community could see and hear the performance.
for the Spring Concert, using a film company to record the Senior Choir in the College grounds singing ‘Waving Through a Window’ from Dear Evan Hanson, amongst others.
We did manage to re-interpret some of the usual highlights of the Churcher’s musical calendar: the Carol Service moved location to St Peter’s Church, where some clever filming of each year group’s choir enabled us to re-create the service as close to the ‘real’ event as possible. A virtual Remembrance Concert saw the year group choirs all recorded performing outside, accompanied by the orchestra of wind and brass players recorded at home and string players in their year group bubbles. Our amazing tech team spent countless hours piecing it all together to produce a beautiful video, fit for any Remembrance Concert, and one which will remain a lasting memory of this extraordinary year! We became even more technically adventurous
Given the challenging year our musicians had faced, we had one hope for the end of the Summer Term which was to achieve something that we hadn’t managed to do all year – a live concert! Following the relaxation of restrictions in May, we were finally able to resume our cross-year ensemble rehearsals, albeit still with social distancing. We had high hopes that our Grand Summer Concert at Cadogan Hall was going to be able to take place, but sadly when restrictions didn’t ease in June, that plan had to be cancelled for the second year running. And so, we set about working out how to enable parents to see and hear the amazing work that had been taking place whilst conforming with restrictions, hence an outside ‘open rehearsal’ on the date of the Cadogan concert. Plans were put in place to move the mighty Grand Piano outside, in preparation for a long-awaited performance of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, postponed once already from the previous year. The
54
The Churcherian 2021
weather may have scuppered plans to move the Grand Piano, but we nonetheless ensured that George Whittle was able to achieve his dream of playing this wonderful piece with the College Orchestra. His extraordinary performance was not the only treat of the day: Anna Lezdkan had also been preparing a concerto and performed the Carmen Fantasy by Sarasate – and again, this was truly virtuosic playing at its best! We were treated to exceptionally exciting playing from not only the College Orchestra, but also from the Junior Orchestra (75 musicians consisting of the Junior Wind Band and Junior Strings ensembles), the Jazz Band (with the very talented Florrie Ransom singing ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’), all the strings in the school playing ‘Dreams of Fireflies’ with the amazing guitar player Alex Way and the Senior Wind Band who delighted us with three wonderful pieces. Our singers were also in good voice! The year group choirs have been a great success and when we joined all the singers together, the Senior Choir totalled 95 and the Junior Choir 55, so when put together to sing an ever popular ‘Queen’ medley, the volume level was impressive even if it was
