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

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.

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.

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!

Young Performers Concert Series - Laura Lucas

What a busy day it has been today! Not only have we had the Young Performers Concert Series at the Foundling Museum, but we've also been at Blanche Nevile School for the Deaf with a year 6 group, and also performing at the end of our Moving on with Music project at Stewart Headlam School in Tower Hamlets.

Having such a busy day and such a small team, I obviously couldn't attend everything today, but am glad I chose to go to present the Young Performers Concert. Laura Lucas and her accompanist Dominic John were absolutely fantastic, and one of the best in the series, one of our regular audience members assured me. They played a great varied programme, starting with Sonata in F minor for Flute and Piano by Telemann, followed by Sonata for Flute and Piano op.164 by Poulenc and finished with Lowell Liebermann's Sonata for Flute and Piano.

The audience (though hot on this gorgeous summers day) were obviously impressed, and gave the performers warm rounds of applause and cheers of bravo.

Thanks to everyone who came along and thank you as ever to the Foundling Museum who hosted us, and the Musician's Benevolent Fund who support the series. Thanks to Dominic and Laura too, who arrived later than they would have liked to, having mislayed one of the pieces of music they were performing in Dominic's house move! Hope you settle in Dominic!

In Training

In Training has come round so quickly! It's tomorrow and we're busily putting together all the finishing touches.

Personally I'm very excited about our new display board - tomorrow night it will be showing the same display that has been up in Stratford Library for the last couple of weeks with lots of interesting information about Newham Welcomes the World and the East London Concert Series, programmes, quotes, songbooks, you name it! Do come and have a look (and say hello to us) if you are coming to the concert.

Vicky and Ron have been talking on NuSound radio this morning about tomorrow's concert and our work in East London generally - we were all listening in the office and thought they were both excellent and, as well as being informative, really conveyed the personality of the NLO and what we're about.

One of the other things we are doing is tidying up our audience survey for In Training - is there anything you think we should be asking? What do you want us to know about you? Is there any subject on which you'd be really interested to hear the opinions of other audience members? If so, do let us know and we'll do our best to include it!

And then there's the shopping (making sure there's enough tea and coffee for the musicians!) packing up all the music, printing off signs for dressing room doors, getting lists of guests...I'd better get back to work then!

Looking forward to seeing you there and, as ever, do come and say hi if you see us - we'll be wearing our badges!

Peter and the Wolf - what did you think?

At our recent Peter & the Wolf concert we asked the audience to fill in some questionnaires - we got some interesting and encouraging responses...

How much did you enjoy the concert?

1 (didn't like it) 0%

2 0%

3 6%

4 45%

5 (loved it) 48%

What was your favourite piece?
The top answers were...

Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf 28%
Godfrey - Dance no 3 27%
Faure - Pavane 20%
Mozart - Overture to the Marriage of Figaro 16%

It's really important to us that we play new music, whether that's a premiere or a performance of music that is rarely performed and so new to audiences, so it was great to see Godfrey's Dance no 3 being rated so highly.

How many other classical music events have you been to in the last 12 months in East London?



0 68%

1-2 24%

3-6 7%

7+ 1%

Would you like to see more classical music events like this in East London?


Yes 90%

No 0%

No opinion 10%


Thank you for coming to the concert and also for responding to our survey to the 35% of the audience that live in Newham, the 19% that live in Tower Hamlets, 1% in Greenwich, 4% in Waltham Forest, 6% from Hackney, 3% from Barking & Dagenham and 32% of the audience that live in other boroughs. Hope to see you all again soon!