The Autumn Ensembles Concert on Tuesday 14th November featured the school’s bands, orchestras and chamber groups performing music prepared during the first half term. Beginning with the String Orchestra playing beautifully peaceful movements from Tchaikovsky’s Album for the Young, the Brass Chamber Ensemble followed with Handel’s energetic Overture to Music for the Royal Fireworks. The Jazz Combo then presented the standard ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ and the up tempo roots rock classic ‘Proud Mary’. Following this, the Serenade in D played by the Chamber Orchestra was an arrangement of Beethoven’s familiar Op.28. With the wind and brass joining the strings, the Symphony Orchestra performed Sibelius’ stirring tribute to his homeland ‘Finlandia’ followed by the first of Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Song Suite movements. The string chamber ensemble then presented the first movement of Haydn’s Quartet in G Op.76, before the Concert and Wind Bands took the stage to perform two spiritual arrangements: Swing Low and Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. The Concert Band concluded the evening with Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing and I’m Beginning to See The Light.
