Save the Spire!
7pm, Saturday 15th June.
St Martin-of-Tours, Church Road, Chelsfield.
Join us for an hour of gorgeous music for strings followed by drinks and nibbles – a fundraising concert for the St Martin-of-Tours Spire Appeal
The musicians – familiar faces Gary Ryan, guitar; Clare Duckworth and Scott Storey, violin; Gillianne Haddow and Malcolm Johnston, Viola; Rebecca Gilliver, cello and introducing a new musician to our Worlds End Music family, Gwenllian Llyr, on harp. The concert is a kind of pot pourri of pieces, demonstrating the differences between the bowed strings and the plucked ones, with a couple of collaborations between the factions!
Mozart – Divertimento in D major
Debussy – Premiere Arabesque;
Gary Ryan – solo piece for guitar;
Boccherini – the Fandango from the Guitar quintet;
Pearl Chertok – Harpicide at Midnight!
Saint-Saens – The Swan
Viola trios – arrangements by Malcolm Johnston
Piazzolla – Cafe 1930 for Viola and Guitar
Encore….if you clap for long enough!
Ideas in the pipeline
Other ideas we are working on at the moment include more concerts in our ‘Double Trouble’ duo series. And 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!
Childrens Concerts
We had a lovely a woodwind concert for the children last season and we are working on a ‘Musical Magical Mystery Hunt’ in High Elms for next summer. This will be a weather-dependent date! I have approached Bromley council several times, but I’ve not had much success – trying again for 2025! Gwellian Llyr, on harp, has recently given a performance for children at Tubbenden School and we are hoping she might reproduce this for Worlds End Music soon.
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 Aritsts 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.