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Hello and welcome to the April edition of the Southbank Sinfonia Diaries!
April has been an exciting month of new beginnings for Southbank Sinfonia (SbS). We resumed in-person rehearsals at the beginning of the month and the orchestra was reunited for the first time since last November. For many of the orchestra this involved travelling back to London from all over the world and negotiating varying periods of quarantine. I had to tear myself away from the seaside in Dorset which was tough of course but nothing when compared to Bradley's trip back from America or Erlend's journey from Norway!
As you know, we have also moved into St John's Smith Square, and it was from here that we began our music-making in April. We took part in a livestream trial run to perfect our camera and mic setup for a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No.5 with Simon Over conducting. This symphony, with its transformation from dark C minor to triumphant C major felt a fitting opening for us, matching our collective sense of optimism for the year ahead.
The orchestra continue to be arranged to maintain a suitable social distance. There's a lot of space between us, but we are growing used to this way of working and, if anything, this added challenge is helping us to develop our ensemble and listening skills across the whole orchestra. Our orchestral manager Felix Lo and the team did a wonderful job arranging microphones and cameras and coordinating the livestream and it seemed to go well!
Photo Credit: Teralon
It is a joy to play at St John's Smith Square (SJSS), though I am likely biased having worked as an usher at SJSS for a number of years now, welcoming audiences and preparing the venue for concerts. It is a wonderful building with a lovely team of staff and it is a great pleasure to spend even more time there now making music with Southbank Sinfonia. This exciting new partnership offers so much potential for each organisation to grow and expand their work.
We're fortunate also to be able to continue our relationship with St John's Waterloo (home to the orchestra for almost 20 years!) and, importantly, to continue the activities of the orchestra in education and community settings in Lambeth whilst also forging new links of this kind in the Westminster area.
We're looking forward to 'In Harmony Lambeth' resuming in May. Members of SbS will be supporting the after-school programme through anything from instrumental coaching, orchestral side-by-side, co-leading/supporting sectionals, and improvisation activities, and I am very much looking forward to being involved with this.
Our first concert and public livestream was a side-by-side project with members of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. It was a great privilege to play alongside these wonderful musicians in Beethoven's Symphony No.1 and Haydn's Symphony No.103 'Drumroll'. We were working without a conductor and turned the orchestra around with wind and brass facing the strings to create more of a chamber music feel. This proved a nice way to work, and we ended up keeping this setup for the concert.
Thank you to all those who were able to join us for this launch concert. It was well attended with more than 200 people tuning in!
The following week was a complete change with works by Wagner on the schedule under the baton of conductor Lee Reynolds. This repertoire is not often attempted by a chamber orchestra, but Lee's outstanding arrangement allowed us to give a brief tour of the fourth and final instalment of Wagner's Ring Cycle in just 39 minutes of music. To give an impression of the scale of the original work, the full orchestration calls for 8 harps!
The last week of April saw the start of rehearsals for a chamber music concert. We divided into various formations to prepare string quartets, wind quintets etc. to be performed from mini stages around St John's Smith Square. I really enjoyed preparing Richard Strauss' Serenade for 13 Winds, and Amy Beach's late work for wind quintet, Pastorale.
April has been a month focused on playing together as an orchestra again, but the fellowship involves much more than orchestral training. This month we were also fortunate to attend a talk by Roger Wilson, co-founder of Black Lives in Music, discussing issues surrounding diversity and inequality in the music industry.
Roger shared some of his own varied career experiences as a performer, educator, manager, and advocate in the classical and jazz sectors, and introduced some ways that we as organisations and individuals can begin to address what are often subconscious or structural biases or those imbedded by tradition or established cultures within organisations. He discussed the importance of representation and role models and the part that concert programming and education can play in promoting diversity and creating opportunity in music. His passion, through BLiM, to be an agent of change not only within the music industry but also in wider society, was inspiring.
Other April highlights included the birthdays of clarinetist Guillermo, which we were able to celebrate with a visit to a bar (or two), and the birthday of violinist Cora, which was celebrated with pizza the following day - real life activities! On a final personal note, I learned that contrary to popular belief, sport is bad for you and the London Underground is extremely difficult to negotiate on crutches, especially with an oboe or cor anglais...
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Looking ahead to May we have the very exciting prospect of concerts with live audiences, and we look forward to welcoming you to St John's Smith Square as soon as possible!
Thanks for reading and do look out for the May edition.
Emily
Find out more about Emily hereLead image photo credit: Teralon