ACADEMIC MUSIC
Lucy Morrell, Head of Academic Music, looks back on an exciting year for the GCSE and A-level Music students
T hroughout the academic year, the GCSE and A-level students have been fortunate to attend a wide range of live concerts and performances at a number of prestigious venues. In September the Year 12 and 13 Music students went to Cadogan Hall to hear Lucienne Renaudin Vary perform Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto alongside Efrain Oscher’s Rapsodia Latina . The London Chamber Orchestra also performed Haydn’s Sympho- ny No.97 in C major and Piazzolla’s Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra. Later that term the group went to the Royal Festival Hall to hear the incredible violinist Nicola Benedetti play Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto. The programme also featured Duke Ellington’s Three Black
Kings , his last composition. According to Ellington’s son Mercer, the piece was meant as a eulogy for Martin Luther King and it depicts Balthazar (one of the Magi), King Solomon and finally Dr Martin Luther King Junior. The concert closed with an orchestral medley of excerpts from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess , including the famous tunes ‘Summertime’, ‘I got plenty of nothing’ and ‘It ain’t necessarily so’. At the end of January, the A-level students went to the Temple Church to hear a very special concert of Stravinsky’s own transcription of the Rite of Spring for piano duet, performed by Libby Burgess and Chris Hopkins. It was an incredible performance of one of the A-level set works, with the pianists exploiting a huge range of colours and timbres, whilst bringing the complex rhythms and intricate polyphonic textures of Stravinsky’s pivotal work to life. In February the GCSE musicians went to the Horniman Museum for a GCSE music afternoon focusing on music from a range of different cultures. The first session of the day was presented by two musicians from Bantu Arts, who performed on the ngoni (a West African plucked string instrument) and djembe as well as vocals. The oud player Rihab Azar later gave a superb explanation of Middle Eastern music, including the use of microtones as well as the different rhythmic patterns in Arabic music. The final session of the day was given by musicians from The Bhavan, the largest Indian Arts Centre in the UK. The students learnt about different rags and tals whilst hearing performances from the tabla, harmonium and voice. Later in the term, the GCSE students went to Blackheath Halls to hear a live performance and seminar on two of their set works: ‘Samba em Prelúdio’, as arranged by Esperanza Spalding but originally by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes; and ‘Killer Queen’. The pieces were performed
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