November 19th Meeting

After the success of the Carlos Bonell concert, we thought things may be a little quiet for November's meeting. How wrong that turned out to be!! Considering we were up against Strictly Come Dancing, we had a creditable attendance!!

We had an excellent evening with quality solo performances and some great ensemble performance under the leadership of Rob Sellery and John Mann.

Our usual ensemble leader Ray Butcher is taking a quiet well earned rest for his long monthly journey from Enfield to Bromley to take up the baton for our ensemble practice. Indeed we were very fortunate to have Ray lead our sessions and in some respects we grew to depend on his contribution each month. Ray's indication of a desire for a break made us sit up and take note of our own resources.

And we are very fortunate to have some quality ensemble leaders among our team. Rob Sellery took us through a performance of a Sonata. He was very patient and authoritative in musical leadership and delivery.  We spent some time concentrating on the dynamics of the piece which we managed to pull together very well.

John Mann also stepped up to the conductor's podium with a challenging piece Joporo by Andrew Forrest. This piece was a little more complex in its form but, under John's guidance, we managed to tie it together extremely well despite a few issues with the music notation.

Some great solo performances and duets were included- may have been inspired by Carlos Bonell last month!!

These included
Bach -Cello Gavotte No 1                                    (Andrew Ferrier)
Torroba -Fandanguillo                                          (John Mann)
Ryan -Birds flew over the Spire

Brouwer-El Decameron Negro                               (Rob Sellery)

Sellery- Revery                              
Anon-    Helston Floral Dance                                 (Marion Davis)
Anon- The Rakes of Mallon
Lindsey Clark- Vals in Homage to Antonio Lauro   (Jenny Wormald)        
Cottam The Centaur                                                (Trevor Pike)
Barrios Mangore Villancico De Navidas
Carulli- Et Nottorno                                                 Vince Chittenden /Larisa Lieberman)

As soon as Vince's sound pixies have rendered the music files we shall link them to the blog so you can listen for yourselves.

Update: Sound files have been added. Thanks Vince!

The Meeting was chaired (abley as ever) by our esteemed Chairman, Den Stockton who welcomed a new member David Wheeler. Den also thanked Ray and John on behalf of the group for their preparation and leadership of the ensemble performances. (I have a sneaking suspicion he was relieved to avoid having to run the ensembles himself!!)  On a serious note, Den also reminded us that we need to start thinking about the Federation Guitar Societies meeting for 2012 as well as next year's Beckenham Festival. We were rather surprised about this until he reminded us that there are less than 9 meetings before the FGS event takes place....a sobering thought!! So we need to start thinking about a program!!

Special thanks to Trevor Pike for providing the refreshments!!The evening finished at 9:45pm.

Please note that the next meeting will be on December 10th (second Saturday in December)