Our Courses

Join us for a rehearsal workshop with four conductors from the Royal College of Music’s postgraduate course in orchestral conducting, nominated by Toby Purser, the RCM’s Head of Conducting, each working on a movement of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony, under the supervision of our Artistic Director, Levon Parikian.
Applications are invited for all sections of the orchestra from players at Grade 8-plus, or equivalent.

Bartók wrote The Wooden Prince as a one-act pantomime ballet (1914–1916) to a scenario by Béla Balázs. Bartók described the ballet as “a kind of elaborate symphonic poem to be danced to”. Despite a successful premiere in 1917, he came to realise that there was much musical padding in the ballet (for which he blamed Balázs). Over the following fifteen years he made many cuts in the stage version, and produced two leaner orchestra suites.
Set in an enchanted forest, The Wooden Prince is based on a fairy tale-like libretto featuring a prince and princess. The two are subjected to various trials, but at the end of the ballet they are allowed to come together and live, we assume, happily ever after. The score’s first few minutes are dazzling, a folk-tinged re-tread of Das Rheingold’s opening, the ensuing music blending ardent romanticism with the grotesque.

Strauss’s tone poem An Alpine Symphony (Eine Alpensinfonie), premiered in 1915, describes the exhilarating expedition of a trek through the Alpine mountains, featuring waterfalls, glaciers and an ear-splitting storm. Scored for a large orchestra, with additional woodwind and brass, including a heckelphone, Wagner tubas and off-stage brass, the orchestration includes parts for wind and thunder machines, and cowbells.
Applications are invited for all sections of the orchestra from players at Grade 8-plus, or equivalent.

These two contrasting masterpieces, by great composers of the 20th century whose musical styles took radically different paths, are united by a moment in time, both being composed in 1908.
Webern’s Passacaglia is, unlike his later work, for the most part lush in tone and texture, relating to a late-Romantic sound and melodic contours that he would later abandon in his quest for a personal, stripped-down style. The simple device of a passacaglia, a mainstay of the Baroque, consists of a short theme in the bass overlaid with a series of variations on that theme. Ravel was born in the Pyrenees, and his mother was Basque, and his lifelong attraction to and mastery of the Spanish idiom is undeniable. Written in only thirty days, the four-movement Rapsodie was an immediate success and firmly established Ravel as a master of the orchestral medium.

Mussorgsky’s famous wander round an exhibition of works by Viktor Hartmann, in Ravel’s splendid orchestration, is complemented by Anna Clyne’s 2020 three-movement work inspired by Mark Rothko’s 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow.
Applications are invited for all sections of the orchestra from players at Grade 8-plus, or equivalent.

Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony was his first major post-war work, and its sometimes violent mood inevitably led to it being known as his ‘War Symphony’ – to which he replied “it never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.” It is paired with his pupil Maconchy’s prize-winning overture, written in celebration of the Thames, depicting “its rapid growth from small beginnings to a great river of sound.”
Applications are invited for all sections of the orchestra from players at Grade 8-plus, or equivalent.