Category: Uncategorized
Legacy helps SASO to scale the Alpine Symphony’s heights
St Albans Symphony Orchestra (SASO) has celebrated the life of a woman known to many in the city as ‘”the little lady on the bicycle” by performing one of the biggest and loudest pieces of classical music ever written. A legacy left by Babs Yule, a long-time friend of the orchestra who died aged 90 …
Festival Concert is a family affair for SASO’s conductor
St Albans Symphony Orchestra’s Festival Concert promises to be a family affair on Saturday 23rd June when conductor Bjorn Bantock leads the performers in music composed 80 years ago by his great-grandfather, Sir Granville Bantock (7.30pm St Saviour’s Church, Sandpit Lane, St Albans). Sir Granville was a leading figure in British music-making in the first …
Conductors wield the cake knife at SASO’s 80th birthday party
Three conductors helped St Albans Symphony Orchestra to celebrate its 80th anniversary last week together with violinist Jennifer Wigram – the orchestra’s leader who has worked with all of them during the past 30 years. Andrew Parnell (1983-2001) and James Ross (2001-2010) swopped their batons for a cake knife together with SASO’s current principal conductor …
SASO celebrates 80 years of music-making with top-ten classics
St Albans Symphony Orchestra is to celebrate its 80th anniversary by performing two of Britain’s best-loved classics: Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven (7.30pm, Saturday 28th April, St Saviour’s Church, Sandpit Lane, St Albans). The young Russian-born virtuoso Alissa Firsova will be the soloist in the Rachmaninov work, which was this month voted the number one spot in Classic FM’s ‘Hall …
St Albans and Watford forces combine to perform Verdi’s searing Requiem
The musical forces of St Albans Symphony Orchestra and the Watford Philharmonic Society join together this month to perform Verdi’s blazing Requiem –the most famously spine-tingling of all settings of the Latin funeral mass (7.30pm, St Albans Abbey, Saturday March 10th) The great Italian composer, although agnostic himself, vividly depicts the desperate pleas of mankind …
Donors invited to bang the drum for SASO
Conductor Bjorn Bantock (with SASO percussioni Kieran McGuirk) needs a bigger drum to bash. St Albans Symphony Orchestra is promising music lovers plenty of boom for their bucks if they contribute to a campaign to raise up to £1,500 to buy a big bass drum and other percussion instruments. Those who give especially generously will …
ORCHESTRA RAISES RECORD SUMS FOR CHARITY
As published in the letters column of the Herts Advertiser: Dear Editor We would like to thank warmly, through your columns, everyone who contributed so generously to three different Christmas and New Year charity collections involving St Albans Symphony Orchestra. Altogether the good people of Hertfordshire have helped us raise nearly £4,000 for charitable causes. …
Dear Santa…. please bring Bjorn a groovy güiro!
Urgent message for Santa: aftershave and novelty socks won’t do for conductor Bjorn Bantock as he prepares to conduct his first New Year’s Day concert in St Albans Abbey. What he really needs for Christmas is a hollowed-out gourd with holes and grooves cut into it. Known in Spanish as a güiro, the gourd is …
Anything but a quiet life…
Bjorn Bantock, SASO’s new conductor, looks forward to the orchestra’s 2010-11 season Despite an increasingly successful international career, Bjorn Bantock, who has been appointed Principal Conductor of the St Albans Symphony Orchestra (SASO) for its new season, jumped at the opportunity to take up the baton in the city he has chosen to make home: …
