However, we can announce –

Classical Christmas! 7pm, Saturday 7th December,

St Martin-of-Tours, Church Road, Chelsfield.

By popular demand, we’re bringing you a traditional string quartet to give you some early Christmas cheer! Music will include arrangements of the Nutcracker, Vivaldi’s Winter (can’t have a Christmas concert without it!) other Christmas chestnuts and some lovely surprises. Updates with more information coming soon!

Virtuoso Violins is postponed due to unforeseen circumstances, with our apologies. We will announce the new date for this fiddling fantasia early in 2025 (which is not far away now!)

Upcoming Concerts – The Aliara Duo. Flute and Harp, Thursday 27th March, 7pm.

With Gwenllian Llyr and Sirius Chau. As artists with City Music Foundation, Aliara Duo was born out of a passion or collaboration and creative programming. Flautist Sirius Chau and Harpist Gwenllian Llyr have won numerous awards at national and international levels for their compelling solo performances, including at the world-renowed Royal Overseas League Annual Music Competition. Their serendipitous meeting through City Music Foundation led to the formation of Aliara Duo, and over the past year of performances the have developed a strong musical bond. Sirius and Gwenllian are both keen to explore the wid range of music already available for this ever-popular pairing of instruments, while also indulging in their love of discovering new usic and championing undiscovered works.

Virtuoso Violins! (postponed from November 11th, date tbc.)

Having to postpone Virtuoso Violins was a difficult decision we didn’t make lightly, but we are determined and will be rescheduling it. Here are the details:

Join us for an hour of fabulous fiddling! Two members of the London Symphony Orchestra will perform music by Prokofiev, Leclair, Bartok and others to give you a glimpse in the world of the virtuoso violin.

Featuring as the main event, Prokofiev’s wonderful Sonata for 2 violins, Op. 56, Naoko and Alix will explore a range of repertoire celebrating the diva of the string family – the violin! Worlds End Music is delighted to invite back Naoko Keatley, one of our very local violins and a member of the London Symphony Orchestra. Naoko wowed us all with her music-making in Worlds End Music’s very first set of concerts, when she performed in Vivaldi’s The Seasons, and played about 6 million notes over 3 concerts. She is joined for this concert by good friend and LSO colleague, Alix Lagasse. Alix is from Antwerp and is not local at all, but we’ve bent the rules a little to get her over to Orpington from far-flung west London! They will bring you an hour of violin duos, featuring music by Prokofiev, Leclair and Bartok, with a couple of surprises thrown in. I always spend my time in the LSO in awe of my violin colleagues, so I’m delighted to bring you this special concert celebrating this pair of virtuoso violins.

Mozart’s Letter – a wonderful hour of music and readings collated by principal flautist of the LSO, Gareth Davies. Music from the Mozart flute quartets interspersed with readings from his letters. An informative, touching and amusing way to spend an evening.

Ideas in the pipeline

Other ideas we are working on at the moment include more concerts in our ‘Double Trouble’ duo series. Local cellist Henry Hargreaves and I will be doing a cello duo concert in 2025. Gwenllian Llyr, our fabulous local harpist, will be bringing you an evening of harp and violin duos. Another project we would really like to get going on is ‘A Bach-a-thon’ – an ambitious project which hopefully will involve a day-long livestream of a marathon of Bach performances (it will include the cello suites, some of the violin partitas) with a culmination event including at least one of the Brandenburg concertos. Details will be announced as soon as possible – it’s finding the dates and the time to update everything that’s hard!

Childrens Concerts

Young Artists Programme

We are continuing our commitment to including a talented young local musician in as many of our concerts or festivals as possible. One of our young artists is returning for the Save the Spire concert – Scott Storey, on violin and viola.

Young artists we have heard already include young professional trumpeter Louis Barclay; violinist Scott Storey (now co-leader of the NYO); singer Jonathan Brookes and cellist Nina Kiva, who was the star of the show at our Ukrainian fundraiser. For the last 2 Christmas concerts we have invited 10 year old Martha Norris from Sydenham to give her concert debut singing ‘Walking in the Air’. Next season we have already confirmed one of our Young Artists – cellist Henry Hargreaves, who is very local indeed having grown up ON Worlds End Lane! He is already a seasoned professional in his own right, so I think I’m going to have to stop calling him a Young Artist!

Festival of Youth

Another idea we have in the pipeline is a Festival of Youth. Continuing on from our desire to nurture young music in the community we are working on a plan to hold two concerts of young musicians. The first would be school-age players chosen from the classes of local music teachers; the second would be a showcase for college level students. Just on the top of the hill here in Green Street Green there are three teachers representing The Royal Academy, The Royal College and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama so we’re very excited about these possibilities.