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.

The Carnival at the Circus

Last night saw the New London Orchestra present it's second concert in Newham at the Stratford Circus. The programme featured lots of English dance music including Grainger's Shepherd's Hey and Holst's arrangements of Morris Dance tunes including English Country Gardens. Of course the highlight of the evening was The Carnival of the Animals with the wonderful Murray Melvin reading the poems by Ogden Nash, which went down a storm. Also playing both in the Carnival and also in a fantastic performance of Ravel's La Valse were two students from Trinity College of Music, Matthew McCombie and Yoon-Seok Shin. These guys are incredible, so many notes I could barely keep up, and I was page turning for Yoon which was pretty nerve wracking!

This concert was in a new venue for us, as we explore different options in Stratford to find somewhere that feels right and creates the accessible and friendly atmosphere we want at New London Orchestra concerts. Stratford Circus was a real winner last night. We were getting all the right feedback, including things like "I felt like I could reach out and touch the orchestra" and "really informal" and "so glad it was brought local to our borough." Gary and his staff were absolute stars and really accommodating as this was a first for them having an orchestra come in, so big thanks to everyone at Stratford Circus.

Hugely successful and firmly in our plans for a come back, was the text poll for the audience to choose the encore for the night's concert. After hearing the Carnival of the Animals we offered the choice of three of the most popular as well as a mystery piece. Winning by far though was the Fossils, and once we'd found our pianists (!) we performed it as an encore. However the secret Ron let the audience in on was that the piece that we'd selected as the 'Mystery' option (one of Ron's arrangement of a Purcell piece called Lilliburlero) we couldn't have played, as I had brought the wrong music!!

Ron reminded the audience about our website and this blog, so if you're reading this and you were at the concert, make sure you post a comment to tell us what you thought of the night.

Life after Peter & the Wolf

We have all arrived back in the office after a crazy day in Stratford! I've uploaded a couple of photos here that I took on my mobile which aren't great quality but we should have some professional ones through very soon.

The day started with a rather chaotic rehearsal. The tubes really weren't working in our favour, with the Central Line out and major distruption on other lines so many people arrived quite late. Not really what we needed when the venue was pretty difficult to spot anyway - it's so easy to walk past as it just looks boarded up. Despite these set backs, we did get the rehearsal running and the sound was really great in the Rex, although slightly hampered by two huge piles of speakers at each side of the stage! Tea, coffee and biscuits certainly helped keep everyone going and Michelle Collins did a really excellent first run through of narrating Peter & the Wolf with the orchestra.

From 1.45pm the children started arriving for the afternoon show - the atmosphere in the hall was brilliant and filled with excited chatter and various clangings from chime bars and drums as some students rehearsed their performances amongst themselves. At 2.30pm we were ready to start and Ron introduced Baden who has been leading the workshops in the four schools we ran workshops in from across East London. We were then treated to an excellent hour of 8 performances by the schools classes, each of which had taken their own take on the characters that feature in Peter & the Wolf. We had hunters with shopping trolleys and pies, a grandfather rap, a chilled out cat and a beautiful picture of an Enchanted Forest created through music amongst other things. We had a team on hand to record the whole thing and so each child will receive a DVD of all the pieces created. Following their performances, the orchestra took to the stage to perform Peter & the Wolf to the audience, a piece we hope could now be grasped with a whole new meaning, after really working on the characters in school sessions. The children's concert finished at 4pm but there will still plenty of children around, getting autographs and to chatting to Michelle Collins.

After we'd recovered from the afternoon we were straight down to sorting out the evening show. We'd given away lots of tickets to employees at Newham Council and Tate & Lyle and so we needed to prompt the Box Office staff and make sure the ushers knew to collect the stubs from the tickets for the all important draw for the chance to win tickets on the Eurostar, kindly offered by our sponsors. Reserved seating signs went out for the stars of the show - St Agnes Year 6 class who performed in the evening concert, and lots of audience surveys and free programmes so everyone watching could learn more about the pieces we were performing and about the Orchestra's work.

Doors opened at 7pm and the Rex quickly filled up. The concert started only slightly behind schedule, simply to make sure all the people pouring in the doors could grab a seat before we began! Ron introduced all the pieces from the stage with facts and context and the orchestra performed really well (despite the stage being a tad cold, sorry guys!!). Michelle Collins' narration was just perfect for Peter & the Wolf and she was really warmly received by the audience and the children who continued to flock for autographs in the interval. As per the New London Orchestra tradition, we included some lesser known music in the programme including Martinu and also a premiere of a Phillip Godfrey piece - Dance No.3. The piece was fantastic and just so fitting for the concert, and our surveys have revealed that it was one of the most popular pieces of the whole evening's concert, so well done Phillip, who also attended the show!

We think yesterday was a real success and hope that we've created the start of a classical music audience in East London. There's certainly plenty of work to be done still - we're collecting lots of feedback and want to hear all opinions so that we can get our whole concert series appealing to a range of people. If you were in the audience and haven't yet taken the survey - please click here.

Life seems very dull without Peter & the Wolf to concentrate on now, but I'm sure things will start to liven up as we approach our next performance in East London - Carnival of the Animals on 14th May.