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What is it like being a Music Scholar preparing for Cadogan Hall 2020?

Lizzie, Year 12, writes about what it is like being a music scholar preparing for the large WHS concert at Cadogan Hall later this month.

As the annual Cadogan Hall concert draws nearer, everyone involved is working hard to rehearse the music and make final preparations for the day, striving to improve upon the standard of the previous year. This is especially true of music scholars, who play various vital roles within the music department.

All musicians have the important task of individually practising their parts and potentially asking peripatetic teachers for help with really challenging passages to ensure they can not only play the music, but engage with the effect each piece is trying to convey. It is crucial that each and every part in the orchestra and choirs are learnt individually if the ensemble is to sound brilliant together. It means that the rehearsals, which are more limited in time than private practise, can focus on developing cohesion and emotion in the music in order to make it really impressive.

Violin players
Violin II section performing at Cadogan Hall in 2019 by Zest Photos

As a music scholar, I also have the role of brass section leader which entails many different things. These range from encouraging other musicians within my section to practise their parts at home, helping to tune in rehearsals and performances, and making stylistic decisions about how our part should be played so that it can sound within the overall emotion.

Section leaders also go through all of the music themselves and note down difficult passages that their section struggles with in order to help highlight them to Mr Bristow, who directs the Orchestra. We then focus on perfecting these few passages in sectional rehearsals, where the orchestra is divided into smaller groups to provide more attention to each part. This is key in making sure that all of the music is ready for the performance, giving each and every pupil in the orchestra the confidence to play to the best of their abilities.

There are also other student-led preparations that must be made and are carried out by scholars such as putting together the programme. This year a meeting was held to re-evaluate the normal design of the programme and to put forward new ideas in the hope that the programme will be not only informative for the concert, but also become more valuable for the pupils as a souvenir of the performance. In addition, scholars are each given a piece to write a programme note for, which contextualises the music for the audience. This requires researching the composer, piece itself, when it was written and then collating the information a brief but interesting way.

Music scholars, especially those in older years, tend to be much better at controlling the nerves that come with performing than other performers due to having more experience performing, like at the scholars’ recitals each term. On concert day it is always really nice to see that everyone is sharing in the excitement and anticipation ahead of the performance, but also helping to make sure that no one is getting very worried or anxious.

WHS 2019 Cadogan Hall Concert, by Zest Photos

One of my other favourite parts is the inter-year bonding within the music department, stemming from shared interests, which displayed and strengthened every year at Cadogan Hall. From the manic and cramped atmosphere in the changing rooms, to the sad realisation that when it is over the leaving year 13s have performed their last ever big Wimbledon High concert, it always feels like the department has come together and achieved its goal of being even better than the year before.

If you would like to come to the concert this year, do visit the Cadogan Hall website to get more information on repertoire and information on how to buy tickets. The concert this year takes place on Monday, 30th March from 7:30pm.

https://cadoganhall.com/whats-on/wimbledon-high-school-2020/

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Review: WHS @Cadogan Hall 2019

Three WHS pupils – Lara, Lizzy and Laura – reflect on the recent WHS concert at Cadogan Hall, where girls in WHS Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia, Baroque Ensemble, Canto and A Cappella performed to a full house.

Lara (Year 7)

It was a privilege to perform in Cadogan Hall which is a very famous, beautiful music hall in Sloane Square dating back to 1907 that has hosted some of the greatest performances of all time. Its number of staircases, dressing rooms, corridors (and lack of signposts!) shows that the entire building was built to impress and a lot of the backstage is just as ornate as the front room itself. It’s wonderful acoustic and scenery lent itself very well to repertoire we did. I, for one, really enjoyed learning pieces by the likes of Brahms, Prokofiev, Mozart, Whitacre and Marquez in Symphony Orchestra, Canto and Sinfonia. In Symphony Orchestra, most of the songs stemmed back to a dance style with pieces such as Brahms’ first Hungarian Dance, a Conga by Marquez and Danza Ritual Fuego by De Falla. These pieces were all really fun to play with a strong sense of movement and liveliness. In the second half, Canto and A Cappella got the chance to perform with tenors and basses- a rare opportunity in an all-girls school. The Mozart Requiem took up most of the second half of the concert – being in Sinfonia, we got to accompany the choir – a new experience for me. We particularly enjoyed performing all these great pieces in such a prestigious venue.

Lizzie B. (Year 11)

Rehearsals for the concert started as far back as the mid-stages of the Autumn term as there was lots of challenging material to learn, both individually and then putting it together as ensembles. Preparations, however, had been going on even many months before that by the amazing music teachers to select and arrange repertoire that we would enjoy playing and which would show off our abilities. Over all this time each of the ensembles rehearsed for a minimum of an hour each week, not taking into account private practice. This is an especially impressive amount considering that most girls are involved in more than one group, displaying the incredible commitment, enthusiasm and engagement of everyone who performed at Cadogan Hall. Furthermore, as the concert drew nearer, the girls in A Cappella and Sinfonia were involved in a 4-hour long Saturday morning rehearsal during which they first sang with the professional tenor and basses, a really challenging task which was achieved with true Wimbledonian spirit and significant amounts of coffee. Finally, on the day we arrived from 12:30 at Cadogan Hall for our final run-through of the concert, getting used to the slightly different sound due to the addition of professional musicians playing parts we weren’t used to hearing. Then the concert began…

Laura F. (Year 12)

It is incredible to see how WHS’s music-making has progressed over the years we have been playing at Cadogan Hall. This year we saw the addition of four trombone players to the orchestra, as a result of a new scheme teaching trombone in school, and with the twelve-strong brass section, the orchestra was able to perform repertoire such as Prokofiev’s intense ‘Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet. The concert included music written over a span of two hundred years from Mozart to Whitacre, showing the breadth of repertoire in the ensembles. In the first half of the concert, the Baroque Ensemble played a rousing rendition of Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite, a challenging four-movement work that celebrated string playing at school. The intermezzo and 3rd movement of the suite that included violin and viola solos, played sensitively by A Level students Miriam and Louisa, were a highlight of the performance, providing some calm contrast before the energetic 4th Movement. At the end of the concert, the year 13s were thanked onstage, as it was their last Cadogan Hall concert; their enthusiasm and participation in musical events will be greatly missed next year. We have all loved preparing for the concert and are so grateful to have had the opportunity to play in such a fantastic venue.