Young Performers - November 2010

The penultimate concert of the Young Performers' Concert Series generated a modest but enthusiastic audience. The soloist Stephanie Oade (cello) accompanied by Daniel Swain on piano, performed a fantastically varied programme with style and panache. The concert began with Handel's Sonata in G minor which tied in splendidly with the Foundling Museum's Gerald Coke Handel collection. Then onto the spine tingling Elegie by Faure, a performance that sent shivers through the audience. To finish? A zealous Beethoven Sonata in A major which brought the recital to an outstanding end. It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.
As ever, our thanks go to the Musicians Benevolent Fund for their sponsorship and the Foundling Museum for providing this wonderful venue.

Please be sure to mark the 2nd December in your diaries, it is the last concert of our series and features three young performers from the Purcell School.

For more information about the Young Performers Concert Series or any of our concerts please see our website (www.nlo.co.uk) or contact the office (0207 823 5523).

May/June Events

The last two months have been very busy for the New London Orchestra. Just some of the highlights include performing the world premier of Ronald Corp's The Ice Mountain at the end of March with the New London Children's Choir, the Bach B Minor Mass with the Highgate Choral Society and Handel's Messiah with the London Chorus. Last weekend also saw us recording The Ice Mountain at Angel Studios so we are very excited about hearing the final CD towards the end of the month...watch this space!!

In addition to all of this we have had two more fantastic concerts in the

Young Performers Concert Series by Violinst Charlotte Bonneton and most recently, Kate Hainsworth on Horn. The next one will be on Thursday 3 June with Soprano Eleanor Dennis (pictured) which promises to be just as enjoyable and the perfect way to spend your lunchtime!

The concerts are FREE with entry to the Foundling Museum (£7.50), but we do have 6 compimentary passes to give away for this concert! If you want to apply for one of these passes, click here to email Antonia with your full name and she will let you know whether you have been successful in due course.

If you are free on Saturday evening this week, why not come along to see members of our brass section playing with the Highgate Choral Society at St Michael's Church Highgate in a Brass Anthems concert which should not be missed! Click here for more info and tickets.

We hope to see you soon at one of our future events, but in the meantime keep up to date with happenings on the website and on facebook!

Young Performers: March 2010

We kicked off our Young Performers Concert Series for 2010 with oboist Peter Facer who performed an extremely varied programme aided by his accompanist, fellow MBF prize winner Cordelia Williams. The recital included Paul Patterson's "Phoenix Sonata" for Oboe and Piano (a world premiere!) which was fiendishly difficult for both performers but thoroughly enjoyable for the audience! Also in the programme, an Insect Etude for Solo Oboe - "Praying Mantis" composed by Peter himself who described it as "pleasantly quirky". We were also treated to works by Britten and Schumann. A great way to start off the series and many thanks to the Foundling Museum for their help in getting the series underway. I personally cannot wait for the next installment on 1st April when we will be joined by violinist Charlotte Bonneton. For more details click here

Young Performers Concert Series 2010

That's right, the Young Performers Concert Series is back!

Our wonderful concerts assistant has been busy finalising details, designing flyer's and emailing the series programme to many a person. Tickets are free with entry to the Foundling Museum (a bargain at £7.50) and concerts will take place on the first Thursday of every month between March and December, but don't worry we will be reminding you each time one is coming up!

Opening the 2010 series is oboist Peter Facer (above) on Thursday 4 March, 1pm.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Moving on

It's with great sadness that I am writing to all our blog followers that I will be leaving the New London Orchestra today. I have had an absolutely brilliant year with the NLO, putting together some truly different and exciting concerts all over the capital and starting to build a really strong base in Stratford which I have become very attached to. Some real highlights for me have been the Peter & the Wolf concert back in March, when the NLO launched its concert activity in East London with a huge gala performance. I worked on both the education project in all the schools leading up to the concert, and then ran the event on the day and had a great time with all our brilliant players and the fab staff at the Stratford Rex, who were so delighted to have us.

Another highlight most recently has been the Snowman concert, which really has rounded off a fantastic year in the East of London - selling out to over 300 families and children who were transfixed by the beautiful Raymond Briggs story. Once again, as is always the case with a small team, I organised and ran the whole event, even down to operating the film and screen on the day - very nervewracking, but totally worth it when we pulled it off!

There are so many other brilliant initiatives I have been involved in here that I couldn't possibly mention them all; from the Young Performers Concert Series at the beautiful Foundling Museum, to the fantastic folk at the Highgate Choral Society who do such a great job of putting together the concerts we are lucky to play in with them. I've listened to our fantastic players get through such a range of music this year - starting with Bacewicz recording sessions in a freezing cold church in February, to Elgar's Apostles at the Barbican, to Janeck's Glagoltic Mass in another cold church this November. Considering we often only rehearse on the day of an event, I am always overwhelmed by the incredible playing of our musicians and their dedication to this orchestra and I will miss them all very much.

But anyway, that's enough from me for now. I am pleased to hand over the reigns of both the Concert & Project Management, and the blog, to my successor Kirsten Mackay. I'm sure her blog updates will keep you entertained and up-to-date in 2010.

Merry Christmas!

P.S. Listen again to Sleigh Ride at Stratford Circus on 6th December on our YouTube channel here.

The Snowman - almost sold out already!

Thought I'd let our blog followers know about the huge success we're having with our latest East London Concert Series - our performance of The Snowman has already sold over 200 tickets. Looks like our mission to create concerts that are family friendly and accessible to everyone is starting to gain followers. We're also excited that the highly popular text voting will make a come back, so that audience members can select one of their favourite pieces to hear again at the end of the concert.


Here's an extract from the press release I've sent out:

The New London Orchestra returns to Stratford Circus on the 6th December to perform a pioneering interactive Christmas concert for families in East London. Featuring innovative audience text voting during the concert, and introductions from the stage by Artistic Director Ronald Corp, the concert will attract new audiences in East London that rarely get the chance to experience an orchestral performance up close.

Continuing its presence in East London, The Snowman concert will be the fourth orchestral performance the New London Orchestra has given in Stratford this year, designing concerts and programmes specifically to make orchestral music as accessible as possible in an area underserved by professional ensembles.
To headline the round-up of festive favourites, the Orchestra will accompany Raymond Briggs’ hugely popular film The Snowman, which will be shown on screen above the orchestra as they play the well-loved soundtrack by Howard Blake, live.

Artistic Director Ronald Corp explains: “Together with The Snowman, I have chosen a fantastic range of festive and fairy-tale themed music for this concert. Our events are always fun and informal which is what has made them increasingly popular in East London. Our audience text-voting initiative is completely different from anything other orchestras are doing at the moment. It’s fantastic to give the audience the responsibility for picking part of the programme and always fascinating to find out what people like best – it’s not always what you expect!”


Stratford Circus Events Manager Gary Wilson agrees: “We received excellent feedback from our audiences that attended the New London Orchestra concert here in May and knew that when they returned we would have a great response. That’s already proving the case, with the concert selling phenomenally well. Our family audiences recognise these concerts are a fantastic opportunity to engage with a live orchestra, something that rarely happens in East London.”

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If you want to get your hands on tickets, you'd better be quick, click here to go straight to the Box Office.

Michael Hurd recording sessions

I don't know how many of our blog followers are of the same generation as me, but I certainly have fond memories of my youth in choirs singing the works of Michael Hurd - primarily the fantastic Jonah-Man Jazz - anyone else?!

So I was absolutely delighted to find out when I started the job here that the New London Orchestra would be providing our principal players to record some of Michael Hurd's best known works - Jonah-Man Jazz, Captain Coram's Kids, Swingin' Samson and Rooster Rag. The music is a fantastically catchy mix of jazz and pop, and during the recording session that happened this Sunday, the New London Children's Choir obviously really enjoyed a lot of the choruses which had great tunes.

The recordings took place once again in the freezing cold St Jude's on the Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb. Whilst being a beautiful building, it's absolutely chilling in the winter months, which seems to be the only time we book recording sessions there! So I spent the day wrapped up in my coat, plying the players with hot tea, coffee and a good tray of M&S chocolate biscuits that were appreciated (so much so they were all gone by the end of the first session, sorry Nick and Dave!). We'll let you know when the disc is due for release, on Naxos - hopefully early next year. In the meantime, enjoy this snippet I caught on my iPhone of Jonah-Man Jazz.

Young Performers - November

Our Young Performers Series continued on Thursday with a concert from cellist Evva Mizerska accompanied by pianist Emma Abbate at The Foundling Museum. We saw one of the largest audiences yet with an almost full house treated to a completely Polish programme, including Orniphania for cello and Piano by Bujarski, Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 Op. 18 by Stojowski and Canzona op. 56 by Kryzsztof Meyer. Vicky even had the responsibility of turning the pages at the concert - see the concentration on her face in the video, so many notes!

Though challenging, Meyer’s Canzona proved very popular with the audience - and is a piece that also features of Evva's new CD release (see her website for more details). Click here to watch a video clip from the concert.

Polska Music

I'm back from a break and wanted to report in the blog how our Polska Music concert went. The day was busy as concert days always are for me, as I act as Stage Manager, Orchestra Manager, Box Office Assistant, Front-of-House representative and general ambassador for the Orchestra at all times! However all the running around from front to back stage was well worth it, we had a great turn out and the concert was a great success musically. Our UK premiere of Grazyna's Bacewicz's Simfonietta went down particularly well, and we sold plenty of preview copies of our Music for String Orchestra by Bacewicz, due for release on the 1st November, proving her music really is popular and should be played a lot more than it is. Hopefully our CD and this performance will prove a turning point for her works in this country.

Whilst front-of-house I met some of the audience members, many of whom were new to both Cadogan Hall, and New London Orchestra concerts. It's great to hear first hand how people hear about our concerts and what they enjoy about them, particularly with my 'marketing' hat on (did I mention I do that as well?!). Everyone loved Ron's introductions to the music, something we know he's excellent at doing to give the music some context. I always try to give the pieces we perform as much background information in the programme notes I put together too, and if you were there, I hope you found them informative. Everyone was surprised when we offered the programme booklets for free to our audience members - something we do at all our own promotion concerts. We think it's important our audiences get to understand the music and find out as much about us as they can whilst we perform to them, so it's vital to us to get this information straight into their hands!

There's a review of the concert on Music Web International, you can read it by clicking here. Quite rightly our soloists, Caroline MacPhie, Natalia Brzezinska and Gerard Collett, get a great mention. Got your own comments to make? Write back to us here on the blog, we love to hear your opinions.

Polska Music rehearsal at the Amadeus Centre

Here's a little video from the string rehearsal for Polska Music as they rehearse ready for the UK premiere of Grazyna Bacewicz's Simfonietta. Enjoy, and hope to see you at tonight's concert at Cadogan Hall.

NLO Principals at St John's Smith Square

Here are some pictures of our rehearsal and concert at St John's Smith Square; a concert which combined our brilliant principal New London Orchestra players with an orchestra of post and under graduate students, and a 'Come & Sing' choir, brought together by Carolyn Pascall at Pascall Promotions. You can also watch a video at our YouTube channel.

The day was loads of fun and considering we put together the entire Haydn's Creation in just 4 hours of rehearsals, I think the final concert was really impressive. The whole event was raising money and awareness for the Access for All campaign at St John's Smith Square.

We also got some great feedback from the students sitting with our principals, who gained a lot from the chance to play with them. Here are just a few quotes:

"I Thought Anna Noakes [flute] was great. Such a lovely person and an amazing player. She was very friendly to both of us and I learnt so much from being able to sit next to her when she gave me the opportunity to double her first flute part. It was a fantastic experience for me and I would love to do more things like that. Thanks for the opportunity."

"It was an absolute joy sitting next to Jonathan Baritt (Viola principal). He made feel so welcome and I felt so much from him just by sitting and playing next to him. I asked him general career advice and it was very useful."

We are really keen to do more events like this to give students an opportunity to play and learn from our principals, so keep a look out on the blog and website for more details.

Polska Music on the Classical Music Homepage

Our Polska Music concert has attracted some more coverage in the virtual world, this time from Classical Music Homepage. Read the article by clicking here. We're getting quite a crowd together now for the concert - thanks to YPIA for advertising the event through the 'free tickets' scheme, we look forward to seeing representatives from the OAE, LSO Discovery, the ABO, IMG and the Musicians Answering Service there! Want to join them? Buy your tickets by click here and a tip for all our blog followers - if you use promo code POLAND when booking online or over the phone, you receive a 20% discount!

Young Performers Series: October

Just a quick note before I head out of the office to post a picture from this month's Young Performer's Concert which featured soprano Colette Boushell. We heard a fantastically varied programme from her and the audience was most eager to give her warm rounds of applause. Thanks as ever to Trevor and the staff for sorting out the gorgeous Picture Gallery for us to perform in, it really is a wonderful space. We hope to see you next time for Evva Mizerska's cello recital on the 5 November at the Foundling Museum. For more details click here.

New London Orchestra in Musolife

Just thought we'd let you know that our Polska Music concert has been featured as a latest headline on the MusoLife website. You can read the story here. We're pleased to see other people are picking up on the exciting story that Bacewicz has to tell. If you haven't yet, you can order your tickets for the concert online by clicking here.

Polska Music and September Newsletter

The NLO blog has been quiet for a while as we have been working really hard promoting our Polska Music concert, coming up on the 14th October. Last week I went on an absolutely fantastic ABO Brass Tacks course all about Press & PR, and learnt how to write a really good press release and create an interesting story, out of what would otherwise just be another concert. We got taught some really fundamental things which are probably obvious to those of you out there in the world of PR, but were news to me! Things like don't write 'Press Release' as the subject of your email, and use a file sharing website for access to high resolution photos... so now we're on Flickr too.

The story I've created is all around our featured composer, Grazyna Bacewicz. After doing my research (I also write all the programme notes for the orchestra's concerts), I've discovered some fascinating things about her - such as the fact she played secret concerts to the Jewish Relief Council during WWII, and how she was involved in a terrible car accident which turned her attention to composing. The work we are featuring in our concert is called Simfonietta (and no, that's not a typo!), and was written in 1935 when she had just returned from her first visit to Paris, somewhere that really inspired her compositions. Her early music is rarely heard (in fact, she deliberately didn't put some of them in her list of works, or refused to have them published), and so our performance will be the UK premiere.

I hope that's given you a flavour for the excitement we're feeling for her music. It's also been great to listen to our new recording of the piece, and other string works. We'll be selling CDs at the concert, so make sure you're there by buying tickets here.

You can also read this quarter's Newsletter which we've posted out to our friends online, by clicking here. Happy reading!

Young Performers Concert Series

Today was September’s Young Performers concert at the Foundling Museum and this month’s performers were AccordDuo (Miloš Milivojević and Zivorad Nikolic) who were absolutely brilliant.

They played a really varied programme, with 3 duets and 2 solos each:

Adios Nonnino Astor Piazzolla
The Ruined Cathedral Vaclav Trojan
Don Rhapsody No.2 Viaceheslav Semionov
Concerto No. 4 in F minor Antonio Vivaldi Op. 8, RV 297
"L'inverno" (Winter)
Sonata Franck Angelis
Five sights on country Gulag Viktor Vlasov
3 3 2 Bogdan Precz

I love Piazzolla but it was also great to hear some music by composers that I didn’t know – the Trojan and Angelis were particular favourites that I’ll be downloading later. Five sights on country Gulag was especially interesting, with Miloš using the accordion to make a variety of percussive and other sound effects as well as singing and whistling, while their transcription of "Winter" from The Four Seasons was, as always, a crowd pleaser!

Milos & Zivorad got a wildly enthusiastic reception from the audience (unsurprisingly of course!) – you can watch a clip of their encore below



You can read Miloš & Zivorad’s biographies in the programme here and read more about the pieces in the programme notes here. If you’d like to catch them again soon you can always check out Milos’s website http://www.milosmilivojevic.com to keep up to date with what they’re doing.

As always our thanks go to the Foundling Museum for hosting the concerts and of course to the Musician's Benevolent Fund who support the series. Thanks also to everyone who came along!

Looking forward to seeing you at the next concert – Colette Boushell, 1 October, 1pm as usual!

Office update

Hi fans,

Just thought I'd give you an update of life at NLO Towers, as our blog is quite quiet at the moment! The office is pretty quiet too if I'm honest, Rob and Julian are both on holidays and so new intern Josh and I listen to Radio 3 and natter about news/sports/TV... and get some work done too!

This week I've mainly been focused on our year-round music provision at Selwyn Primary School in Newham. It's a really exciting opportunity to build music into the curriculum at the school, and make it an integral part of musical life for the students. However it's the first time we've done something like this, so I've been researching kindermusik (we'll be teaching the nursery classes, right through the year 6) and putting together some preliminary lesson plans to get started. Me and some of the musicians working on the project (Aga and David to name just two) will hopefully be meeting Andrea from Selwyn at the end of the month to show her our ideas and get her feedback. I'm mostly looking forward to planning the music projects for year 6 which focus on dinosaurs - imagine the music they will create!

Have a great weekend.

Young Performers Concert Series - Charlotte Stephenson

It's been a busy couple of days in the office and last Thursday we had our August Concert for the Young Performers Concert Series at the Foundling Museum. Taking part this month was Mezzo Soprano Charlotte Stephenson and her accompanist Elizabeth Burgess. We had a great audience which was boosted in numbers by a group from The Music Club of London. They were treated to a varied program which opened with a piece of Mahler and included pieces by Hahn and Quilter before finishing with a work by Bridge. The Concert was a huge success and the audience (even though it was, yet again, on a perfect summer day) thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Thanks again to everyone who came along and thank you as ever to the Foundling Museum who hosted us, and the Musician's Benevolent Fund who continue to support the series. Thanks to Charlotte and Elizabeth too who gave a fantastic performance

Our Bacewicz CD - hear some extracts!

How very exciting, I've come back from a two week holiday (did you notice the quiet blog?!) and have been busying myself writing Wikipedia pages for the Orchestra and for our conductor and Artistic Director, Ronald Corp. Whilst doing my research for the citations, I found that Hyperion have posted some extracts of our new CD of string orchestra compositions by Polish composer Bacewicz. They sound great, click here to have a listen for yourself and let us know what you think!

Big Opportunity - Photos from Sadler's Wells