The Wykehamist
The School Concert from the Perspective of Your Average A-level Pupil
One day, while checking SOCS for any of my diminishing ekker commitments, I came across an event titled‘ Mandatory Concert’ on May 1st. I had thought to myself that it, most likely, was an accidental slip-up by a music don who had put me in place instead of someone bearing a potentially similar name. However, on the top-left corner of the reminder was‘ EVENT’ in dark blue; the activity was, in fact, put there by me. Despite taking music A-level, I had scarcely participated or gone to many concerts( sorry to any of my music dons reading this), and for around two minutes I was genuinely terrified that I had forgotten to practise the piano for something important again, so I was deeply relieved to discover that only my attendance was mandatory, and not my lacklustre piano skills.
And so came the evening. Having stuffed myself with tea and two granola bars and grabbing my reluctant roommate, I set off to what would become the greatest musical spectacle I have witnessed at Winchester College( although Henri Berteau’ s( F) performance in the concerto competition final does deserve a shoutout). We wandered into New Hall, and tried to infiltrate the musicians’ room to find some friends before we were escorted out by TJB, and so went back into the New Hall.
First up was the school jazz orchestra with a selection of six pieces of varying, well,‘ jazziness’, which included many alternating solos between some of our very talented musicians( Oliver Jing( Coll:, 2022-), Nye Bayley( Coll:, 2022-), and Caelan Francis( C, 2020-) just to name a few). An energic first piece was then contrasted by April in Paris, a much more‘ lazy’ piece which included some very, very nice scales and notes being slid all over the place, as well as a brief cameo of Pop Goes the Weasel. In El Manisero, their fourth piece, some of our saxophones and trumpets ditched their instruments in favour of some maracas as well as an assortment of other percussion instruments( they do later rejoin, don’ t worry)! I Like It Like That’, recently published by Cardi B, was an engaging piece which heard the audience start clapping to the beat. Overall, the jazz orchestra brought to us the energetic start we needed, especially with Sampanna Raut( H), whose virtuosic drumming during his solos was so impressive that even APD enquired about his name.
Next up were the 47 members of the concert band, 10 of whom were proud Chawkerites. Their piece, Bridgewater Breeze, was split into three movements: foxtrot, samba and hoe down. The xylophones, as Theodore Fergusson( F) indicated to me, were‘ really nice’, which I especially found was true for the first movement. The alternating parts of the orchestra giving a sense of footstep combined with twinkles of the xylophone really conjure up the image of a cunning fox.
Up next was Sinfonia, of which I was a member before I decided to hang up my viola boots. As before, it was a massive orchestra and finally featured the long-awaited violins, which were accompanied by a wide range of percussion instruments in the back which had Nye Bayley scrambling up and down to switch from one instrument to another, much to the cheerful and polite laughter of the audience. Even though the arrangement of percussion was quite comedic, the performance was quite the opposite. The crisp feeling of a wooden xylophone contrasting with the rest of the orchestra playing in legato gave the audience a soft, dreamy image which coupled with the background picture looking like a night full of stars, really demonstrates the program of an American visitor frolicking in the evening streets of Paris. The piece was, however, not exclusively soft, flowing passages as a sudden burst of energy due to the switch-up of style in the now-shorter bowing of the strings brought some contrast within the piece.
The much-awaited arrival of the Symphony Orchestra finally saw TJB step down from his fantastic night of conducting and be replaced by RLB, as well as with five VIBk II A-level musicians out of a possible
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