2024 has been an extremely tiring but hugely rewarding year of conducting for me. I have no more concerts booked until 2025, so for no reason other than to document it and reflect on the amazing collaborations and artistic challenges of the year, here’s a bit of a roundup.
The most regular thing I do as a conductor. So pleased with the concerts and development of the orchestra this year. We are in a great place of being able programme some seriously exciting repertoire and still consistently improve as a team.
Click this dropdown for a full list of our 2024 repertoire
A whole variety of stuff for our annual children’s Concert - Moana, E.T., The Avengers. Fun to give some of my arrangements an outing.
Dvořák - Carnival Overture
Smetana - Vyšehrad from Ma Vlast
Shostakovich - Suite for Variety Orchestra (which everyone knows as Jazz Suite no.2)
Florence Price - Symphony No.3
Schubert - Symphony No.8 Completed by Brian Newbould (repeated in October)
Strauss, R. - Four Last Songs - soloist Georgie Malcolm
Janáček - Sinfonietta
Tchaikovsky - Capriccio Italien
Baker - Violin Concerto - soloist Andy Long (World Premiere)
Berlioz - Roman Carnival Overture
Respighi - The Pines of Rome
Louise Farrenc - Overture No.2
Strauss - Op.7 Wind Serenade
Mendelssohn - Hebrides Overture
Bruch - Scottish Fantasy (with Andy Long again!)
Bantock - Hebridean Symphony
Difficult to pick highlights out of such a lineup, it was all pretty amazing, but fab to get to premiere David Baker’s Violin Concerto with Andy Long after a postponed performance. Really wonderful to put a symphony by Florence Price as the main course of a programme, similarly, to have the mighty yet pretty much unknown Hebridean Symphony as a programme centrepiece. Tough to beat Janáček Sinfonietta and Strauss Four Last Songs in the same concert, especially with a wonderful soloist like Georgie Malcolm and the bonkers brass team for the Janáček. Bucket list stuff.
Northern Opera Group/West Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra
A piece I wasn’t sure about at first but gradually crept under my skin, Parry’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin sets the Robert Browning poem to music in the typical OTT Victorian chorus + orchestra way. There are officially only two solo roles (the Piper and the Mayor). Partner in crime director extraordinaire Rosie Kat turned this into a community opera with four soloists, functioning as the aforementioned characters and an SATB quartet of narrators. Great fun to work with Northern Opera Group, WYSO, Rosie, Madeline Robinson, Kanchana Jaishankar, Michael Vincent Jones, Christopher Nairne, and the wonderful community chorus. Really tricky music even on copy, so a great achievement for all to perform it as an adapted staged production.
As the Parry is only about 30 minutes, WYSO performed more fairytale music; Humperdinck’s Overture to Hansel and Gretel, Ravel’s Mother Goose suite, and Dvořák’s Noon Witch.
In the same month as Piper (March was a bit intense, on reflection), it was great to return to perform again with Square Chapel. Lovely orchestra, great to work with David Baker again (third time doing the Weber with him!). The Schumann…what a symphony, totally amazing. An unexpected highlight of this experience was a certain bassoonist who really doesn't get on with Elgar admitting they really quite enjoyed the Chansons. That’s a win.
We played:
Mozart - Overture to Così fan tutte
Weber - Bassoon Concerto - soloist David Baker
Elgar - Chanson de Matin and Chanson de Nuit
Schumann - Symphony No.3 Rhenish
In May I had the pleasure of working with Sheffield Chamber Orchestra for the first time. Challenging but rewarding to compile a suite from the Lully, great to conduct the concerto with as capable and promising a soloist as James, and the insane Poulenc is another bucket list tick. I asked for bonkers and the orchestra delivered.
Lully - Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
Saint-Saëns- Cello Concerto No.1 - soloist James Hindle
Ravel - Pavane pour une infante défunte
Poulenc Sinfonietta
In June, I got a call on a Tuesday or Wednesday asking if I could jump in to conduct a double bill of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Gluck’s Orfeo on the Saturday of that week. I’m a glutton for punishment so I said yes. I’d never conducted Dido but had led a production as a violinist and studied it at A Level, so that was ok. Aside from the famous aria “Che faro”, I didn’t know the Gluck at all. I sat in the pit on Friday night and marked up my score as the show went along, then conducted the next evening. I don’t remember it much, to be honest, I was concentrating too intensely. There were a couple of interesting moments because there are some things that a conductor who doesn’t know the band or the cast or the chorus and has only heard them do it once can’t account for, but I think it was ok and people clapped at the end! Not for the faint-hearted.
Bandcamps
I have one regular bandcamp at the end of August where I tend to do a fair bit of conducting. This year was no different: Prokofiev 1st Symphony, the Die Fledermaus overture (do waltzes get better than this?), a wonderful Strauss horn concerto No.1 with my friend Julia, and a double session string workshop on Britten’s Variations on a theme by Bridge. Plus vast quantities of chamber music until I could see the dots when I closed my eyes at night. Also ended up playing the violin solo in Brandenburg 4. Several glasses of wine first, you understand.
This year I also had the unexpected pleasure of conducting the Rydal Genin Orchestra in the Lake District at the start of August. Essentially a group of nutters who drink lots of gin, go for walks and bash through several symphonies a day. Can’t remember the full list of what we played, but definitely Schubert 9, Mendelssohn 3, Beethoven 5 and the Coriolan overture, Tchaikovsky 5, and a willing volunteer/victim bashed through the Brahms Violin Concerto with us. Great fun.
The day job (!)
Not to forget that most of my time is spent working in music education for Sheffield City Council’s excellent Sheffield Music Hub (just recently part of the new South Yorkshire Music Hub). I work with the Intermediate Strings group and Senior Orchestra. The younger strings group are really exciting, it’s a pleasure to lead a group as a member of the orchestra and facilitate their rehearsal as they learn to communicate with each other and play without a conductor - definitely a bright future for the string section of our Senior Orchestra. The Senior Orchestra has had a crazy year. We finished off the academic year in the summer with a repeat collaboration with The Leadmill, performing with young artists from various popular music styles, with bespoke orchestrations by the fab George Morton. We performed two shows in the iconic Leadmill itself, then on the main stage of the Tramlines festival, which is pretty amazing. Thanks to Rose, George, my hub colleagues and everyone who made it happen.
The Senior Orchestra also performed in the Royal Albert Hall for the Music for Youth Schools prom as part of the South Yorkshire Collective, featuring young musicians from Sheffield Music Hub, Sheffield Music Academy, CSYO, Sheffield Youth Orchestra, and the services and hubs of Barnsley, Rotherham, and Doncaster. This 104-strong ensemble were an inspiration, and more than rose to the occasion, performing four tracks as a studio orchestra with the Frequencies Project (tracks by May Payne, Zuc Zoey & Kyle Osbourne, orch. and conducted by Hannah Lam) then premiering two new BBC 10 pieces arrangements; Earth by Hans Zimmer, and The Colour of all things Constant by Cassie Kinoshi. I sat at the back of the violins in awe of the awesome children and young people we have the privilege to work with.
The Monster
The start of November saw the culmination of the project Rosie and I had been preparing for the best part of two years. Jonathan Dove’s The Monster in the Maze, in a new edition I created with Jonathan to allow our full senior string section to join in this insane community opera in The Crucible to celebrate Music in the Round’s 40th Anniversary. This was a collaboration between Music in the Round and Sheffield Music Hub. There’s no good place to start, so I’ll simply say thank you to Jo and the amazing MitR team, Ian, Emma, and my stunning music hub colleagues, Emma and Rachel behind the scenes, Fenna for the wonderful design, Jonathan and Tom the fab repetiteurs, The Consone quartet for being great friends and colleagues, the extraordinary Ensemble 360+, the epic ‘feral’ brass crew, the young people who performed and everyone else in the orchestra, Anthony, Camille, Rob, Paul, the adult and children’s choruses, Concordia, and most of all, Rosie. Read more here: https://www.planethugill.com/2024/11/a-terrific-achievement-professionals.html
So, it's been a rather good year, all in all. I’m in the slightly baffling position that The Pines of Rome is only the third largest brass lineup in a piece I’ve conducted this year. Only the Janáček had more brass than Monster (which had 8 horns, 2 trumpets, 5 trombones, 2 tubas…). So what’s next? Gurre-Lieder? La Grande Messe des morts? Let’s see what 2025 holds.
Comments