Music Education Outreach 2021
With the help of a grant from the Club, Severn Arts has run two more events for local primary schools, once again using the services of Toscana Strings. This group delivered two concerts on Friday 22 October: at Great Malvern Primary School (for KS2 pupils) and at Somers Park Primary School (with KS1 pupils). Somers Park also invited the Y1 and Y2 class from their sister site, Malvern Vale Primary School. The latter school was unable to attend in person due to Covid problems, but pupils were able to enjoy a streamed performance online.
Toscana Strings performed Peter and The Wolf with five string players and a dancer who danced the various roles of a duck, bird, wolf etc. After the performance the children were placed into character groups and encouraged to act out their characters. It was great fun and the children loved it!
Afterwards, the Head Teachers were extremely grateful and Toscana Strings also thanked the Club for making the event possible. A member of Severn Arts attended in the morning and expressed gratitude on their behalf.
Our aim is progressively to cover all the local primary schools. Linda McKinley is in discussion with Herefordshire’s music service trust, Encore Enterprises, to ensure that local schools on ‘the other side of the Hills’ are also given this opportunity.
Post 10/11/21
New Home for Concert Club Archive
For several decades the Concert Club has maintained an extensive record of its activities, absorbing material preserved by a few interested individuals and expanding this where possible. The collection is a rich one, containing as it does committee minutes since 1930, concert programmes, newsletters, press reviews and letters as well as photocopies of relevant diary and correspondence where the originals are not available (e.g. the Troyte Griffith archive in Manchester Libraries) and other ephemera which relates to the Club.
The collection to date has now been passed to the County Records Office at the Hive in Worcester where it will be securely preserved for the future. The plan is that over the next few months it will be catalogued and added to Records Office’s own collection when it can be made available to the public. This does not mean that the Concert Club can now sit back and
do nothing. The collection is a living one, so current programmes and other relevant material still need to be retained so that it can be added to the core collection in due course.
Much of this will be done by committee members who have been diligent in ensuring that recent material has been kept, but every single member can help simply by keeping their eyes open for items such as articles about the Club in magazines, and especially for old pre-1940 programmes where there are several gaps in the sequence. So, when clearing out the attic or
the back of cupboards, please bear in mind the Concert Club for any relevant material that you may come across – it would be a far better destination than either the skip or the fire!
Posted 20/1/22
