Photo Gallery

This photograph was taken in the early 1930s when my father was at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Can anyone identify some of the others present, or date the picture for us, please?
Hexthorpe Junior Mixed School Doncaster c. 1951 - showing just how successful the West Riding's peripatetic instrumental service was after the war. Some 22 violinists on stage from one small, fairly working class primary school would be even more impressive today! Kerry Milan is on stage, just to the right of the conductor's hand. Can anyone name some of the other children, please? I'm afraid I've temporarily forgotten my teacher's name. The music adviser of course was William Appleby and the head of the peripatetic team was a Mr Goodman if I remember correctly.

And what links these faces to our web site? Hans Gal was born in Vienna in 1890. The latter part of his life was spent in Edinburgh and he died there in 1987. He was a prolific composer and I recall his attending a concert at which we were performing one of his works - 'we' being the Glasgow String Orchestra, which Adrian Secchi had founded in 1956 - rehearsals I remember being in Cecil Street, off Great Western Road. This concert must have been around 1959 and by coincidence I shortly afterwards played alongside his daughter, in the Edinburgh Rehearsal Orchestra, I think. In 1934 Gal composed his "Lyrical Suite on Robert Browning's dramatic poem Pippa Passes", for soprano, flute and string quartet. One of its earliest performances was in Vienna in May 1936, and it was performed there again in October 1997, but nearer to home the work was played in Edinburgh in 1987, with George Gwilt the flautist and the Edinburgh Quartet, with soprano Francesca Green. (The text is a translation into German by Helene Scheu-Riesz.) Also in 1987 Francesca sang Gals' Fünf Lieder, op.33, accompanied by Leon Coates, again in Edinburgh. Back in 1964 Leon, I and cellist Ann Morris had formed a piano trio taking Beethoven and Schubert etc to Staffordshire schools and music groups, and among our contacts then was a young solicitor Reg. Browning - the very same who forty five years later would be the stimulus for the composition of my own Five Songs of Asolo, from Pippa Passes, which Yvonne Howard and the English Piano Trio have recently recorded for Ardross House.
At a time when the Public Sector is under so much pressure, and when the Arts and Music within Education are facing such damaging cuts, these photographs (1992) look back just twenty years to a more optimistic age when Stafford Music Centre and the Friends of Staffordshire Young Musicians staged "A Grand Music and Dance Spectacular" featuring the Middle and High Schools of Stafford and Stone. The two concerts, at 5.15 and 8.00 pm, featured different schools and different music ensembles; but in each case the finale was the Galop from Act 3 of Orpheus in the Underworld by Jacques Offenbach, with the brilliant dancers provided by Alleynes High School, Stone.


Just a year later saw "A Musical Extravanga - The Poetry of Motion" this time in partnership with eleven primary and middle schools. On this occasion the finale was Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman's *Chitty Chitty Bang Bang*. I had the huge privilege of conducting these exciting and inspirational performances in a venue now sadly lost, English Electric / GEC's impressive Stychfields Hall in Stafford. Never let us forget what is possible if we care enough about the Arts and what is lost for a generation if we don't.