January 11th 2019
The first recital of the Lent term gave the soloists of Sherborne an opportunity to present an eclectic programme of music ranging from the Baroque to contemporary repertoire.
Three of the music scholars opened the concert with Ricky Xu (Sch. Mus.) and Frederick Folkes (Sch. Mus.) each presenting one of Mike Cornick’s pieces for piano, both skilfully demonstrating the influence of early twentieth century blues music on Cornick’s writing. Between these was Archie Burton’s beautifully poised performace of an arrangemet of Massanet’s famous ‘Medition’ from the opera Thaïs for alto saxophone. This was followed by Bently Creswell’s performance of Purcell’s famous ‘Music for a while’ (a staple of both the vocal repertoire and the GCSE music course), exhibiting a well developed depth of tone in a technically demanding piece. Like the pieces by Cornick, Cassian Blackburn-Enever (Exh. Mus.) provided a contrast to this familiar repertoire with a piece by flautist and composer Ian Clarke, ‘Hypnosis’, which originally began as an improvisation but has subsequently been worked into a fully composed piece for flute, with Cassian’s control of dynamics even in the highest registers imbuing the piece with a suitably dreamy quality. Following this was Hector Fiennes’ presentation of a setting of Shakespeare’s words by Quilter in ‘Come away, Death’, brought to life be Hector’s keen sensitivity to the words’ meaning.
The penultimate piece of the evening was Freddie Graham’s (ATCL, Sch. Mus.) performance of the second movement of Paul Creston’s Sonata ahead of his LTCL exam, where the outer movements of this piece are stunningly energetic, this much calmer movement allows the performer to showcase the delicacy in their playing, which Freddie tackled in a seemingly effortless manner. To round the concert off, and in acknowledgment of the church season of Epiphany, Nathanael Fagerson (Sch. Mus) sang ‘Die Könige’, better known in its English translation and choral arrangement as ‘The Three Kings’. With its gloriously flowing melody accompanied by the sound of the piano gently intoning the German chorale ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’, Nathanael perfectly captured the sense of wonder in the music, providing a fitting close to this curtain raiser to another term’s music at Sherborne.
