GOING SOLO WITH STYLE | Aaron Akugbo, Professional Trumpet Player

GOING SOLO WITH STYLE

Aaron Akugbo, Professional Trumpet Player

Aaron joined St Mary’s Music School in P5 as a chorister, becoming an instrumentalist in S2. An ex-principal of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he graduated from the Royal Academy of Music last summer and is currently trialing with a number of orchestras as well as playing with Connaught Brass, the quintet he set up. Signed up as a solo artist by Sulivan Sweetland Management, he is being hailed by them as ‘a future leading exponent of his instrument’.

“For my final recital, Will Fielding, who was a pianist/organist at St Mary’s Music School and Hugh MacKay, who was a cellist, played with me. It was live streamed during lockdown so people in my year at school watched and loved seeing this reunion. And that’s a massive thing about going to a school like St Mary’s – we all get better as musicians and we meet again, three or four years down the line, and play together again. That’s really special.”

Q: What do you remember most about your time at St Mary’s Music School?

I’d say that the chorister years set me up in the best possible way for what I do now. The amount of music we had to learn, the quick turnaround, the sight reading, the ear training… today, if I sit in an orchestra to play music I haven’t seen before, it’s easy - I’ve been doing this since I was 8 years old. I did four rather than five years as a chorister because my voice broke in S1. We’d come down to London to do a service at St Paul’s Cathedral and I was singing Haec Deum Celi by Tarik O’Regan. There’s a slow scale that moves up to top A and my voice petered out until it was just air. I was so upset! But I auditioned for an instrumental place for trumpet and got in. The brass department was pretty big then – trumpets, trombones, euphonium, French horn – it was so exciting and I got to play lots of music I’d never played before.

Q: How did you find the transition from specialist music school to music college?

When I auditioned for the Academy, I played the first movement of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, and scales and sight reading of course, but I also had to play in front of everyone else who was auditioning. Some people found that really daunting but I was OK because I’d had so much experience of performance at school. In reality, the whole format of aural training in the morning, technical assessment, lunchtime concerts and performance classes really helped with both the audition process and being a student. Part of my audition was writing an essay about how I would plan a concert. Because of the variety of instruments at School and the vast repertoire we all knew from hearing each other play, I could put together pieces I’d played, and pieces I’d heard other people play or sing, to create a programme. For GSCE and A-level music, St Mary’s doesn’t just stick to the syllabus but encourages pupils to find interesting connections between, for example, the set pieces and three or four other pieces. We would look at different aspects - technical, performance, historical, social - to end up with a well-rounded understanding. So, when we analysed pieces of music at the Academy, I felt my experience at school put me ahead. I’m not the most academic person but I knew far more than I thought. At another school you might also do GCSE and A-level Music, but at St Mary’s it’s the ear training, harmony classes, music history, music analysis – all those extra categories – that make the difference.

Q: And what’s next?

A lot of trumpet vacancies came up during my 3rd and 4th year at the Academy. My first audition was Principal Trumpet for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and I did three trial concerts with them which meant that other orchestras saw me working professionally. Now, I’m trialing for principal positions with the Philarmonia Orchestra and English National Opera; for co-principal trumpet with the BBC Philharmonic and second trumpet with the London Symphony Orchestra; and I’m freelancing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, Sinfonia of London and Royal Philharmonic too. When you trial, you could be one of 20 people going for one position so you just have to focus on your own playing, work well with the rest of the orchestra and do your best.

It’s amazing to be doing this. I also got the opportunity to play with Chineke! in London, Europe’s first BAME orchestra, and was signed up by Sulivan Sweetland as a result – they’d also seen some videos I made of myself during lockdown, playing ragtime. So now I have an agent – and that’s pretty grown up isn’t it?