London Mozart Players is Britain’s oldest chamber orchestra but has experienced a dramatic turnaround in the last year. Croydon Council had funded us for the last 25 years and in April, as part of its austerity programme, cut our grant. This was on top of losing funding from Arts Council England which had decided it would no longer fund chamber orchestras, and Nestlé [based in Croydon] which decided, quite rightly, to move into sponsoring more sport.
As a result, we lost the manager of the orchestra and most of the office staff. However the orchestra decided to continue and is now in the hands of the players, which is an exciting prospect. We’ve been working on our plans for the future since Christmas, building up new contacts, and setting up as a company with Vivian Davies as our managing director. People seem to be enjoying the fact they are getting direct contact with the players. There are ten of us, all in charge of different things and I run the education side of things. It’s exciting!
We’re currently working on a large multi-faceted project which centres on the commission of a new choral work by Jonathan Dove called For An Unknown Soldier. The project was created to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, and aims to bring together as many sectors of the Croydon community as possible, particularly schools. Ironically, the project is funded by Arts Council England and by Croydon Council, along with Portsmouth Grammar School and the PRS Music Foundation.
The London Mozart Players have a long-standing relationship with Portsmouth Grammar, which has commissioned a new piece of music for Remembrance Sunday for the last 10 or 12 years, performed by us – they have been wonderful pieces composed by the likes of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Cecelia McDowall.
This year is the first time we are doing a joint project. Portsmouth jointly commissioned this piece by Jonathan Dove as he writes very accessible music. This was really important as it is a community project and the music had to be accessible. But when he was commissioned, Jonathan had no idea if the London Mozart Players or Croydon Council were going to come up with the goods, but he went ahead and started writing the piece in good faith about a year ago.
Thankfully we got the funds, and picked up the pieces of the project in March – six months later than we had planned! The background to For An Unknown Soldier is obviously to commemorate the First World War. Jonathan went down to Portsmouth to look at the archives to get inspiration and use them as a springboard for the composition as well. He started writing, using lots of poets at the time – Wilfred Owen, Harold Monro and Jessie Pope, ten poets in all – and he went to Portsmouth Grammar to do some workshops to help the students with lyric writing, and how to set words to music.
The composition uses quite a big orchestra; it uses children’s choirs, a soprano, alto, tenor and bass choir and a tenor soloist. Portsmouth Grammar’s choir would take part but for our Croydon concert, we had to find four primary schools – just as the Easter holidays were starting.
Thankfully we found our four – Ecclesbourne Primary Academy, Atwood Primary Academy, Monks Orchard Primary and Croydon Parish Church Junior. At the beginning of term, teachers from all four were getting the benefit of the expertise from one of our best choral animateurs – Dominic Packham – a leading light in the industry who conducts at the Royal Opera House, as well as the National Youth Choir. Seeing Dominic work with the teachers was a total inspiration. He did three sessions with them, giving them ways of working from warming up to learning First World War songs, how to develop voices and how to build a choir.
The teachers then went away and started rehearsing with their choirs and each school have had two visits from Dominic since. The children think he’s the coolest person and they would do anything for him.
The piece will have its world premiere in Portsmouth on November 9th and will then be performed on November 14th at Fairfield Halls in Croydon as part of a special programme.
We will have about 150 children from our primary schools, Croydon Minster, Portsmouth Grammar and boys from the Whitgift School. They are all rehearsing separately and will come together on the day under the expertise of our conductor Nicholas Cleobury. It’s a piece, a bit like an opera, with different parts for women, for men, for soloists and the children’s choirs.
Another part of the project, led by Sarah Butcher, is with Croydon’s second biggest school, Ribblesdown Collegiate which will be curating an exhibition in the foyer of the Fairfield Halls.
Thirty young people have visited the Museum of Croydon and had two handling sessions with artefacts from the First World War. They have also visited the exhibition which was put together by St Joseph’s College and in it is a log book from Ecclesbourne School – one of our four primary schools! This whole thing is amazing! It’s linking across Croydon. Ribblesdown will be putting together literary responses to the exhibition and from the beginning of September we have two open mornings called Hidden Croydon where we are inviting the people of the borough to come forward with their artefacts from World War One. Members of the museum will be there to look at the artefacts and look after them, and Ribblesdown students will be there too.
To get even more people involved we are running an art competition which we have sent out to all schools in Croydon and their task is to create a piece For an Unknown Soldier which will be displayed around Fairfield Halls. We’re hoping this will be judged and the winning three paintings will be hung up in the clock tower.
The children totally love the music and cannot believe what we do on our instruments. In the concert hall our average audience is 50 plus. We were on tour in China and the average audience was under the age of 30 – that’s because the parents want their children to play. Whatever we can do through this project to get them on board will be great. London Mozart Players want to be relevant to where we are working and one of our greatest pleasures is to play for people here.