View from the Green Room: SETU Junior Strings celebrate end of year
SETU Budding Bows Orchestra.
It’s the end of the academic year and it’s time for choirs, orchestras and stage schools to shine. Tonight it’s the turn of the SETU Strings to put their stamp on the work of the year with a public performance.
Public performances matter. They build character, strengthen resolve and nothing improves like a public performance where there’s no going back and where the macro concept of the performing arts is condensed into a single performance where all is all.
The Budding Bows Orchestra for young players was founded by the late Deirdre Scanlon and has been in full swing for over 40 years. The list of talented string players that have begun in that musical stable is huge. Individual tuition combined with ensemble performances is the musical scaffolding of this SETU school where community and university combine.
Tonight, 12-year-old Saoirle Dennehy, who received distinction on her grade five violin exam, leads the orchestra for the first time, and Saoirle impresses with her enthusiasm and drive of the young band of string players.
Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is the final movement of his ninth symphony and quite a challenge for the young players. No matter. Budding Bows are up for it and attack the piece with pace and punch. A vigorous, up-tempo ‘Irish Reel’ from the Petrie Collection is a real foot-tapper with a smashing counter melody from the cellos. ‘The Drunken Sailor’ is full of fun with melody and variations popping up everywhere to the delight of the audience.
The Concert Strings Orchestra is made up of older players who have moved up through the grades from Budding Bows. It’s led by 17-year-old Amber Shamshad, who had just received her Grade 8 with Distinction, and who also leads the full adult SETU orchestra.
Hans Zimmer’s composition for the hit TV series ‘The Pacific’ is packed with American patriotic fervour and ‘The Emerald Melodies Suite’ arranged by Samuel Gelfer is a fascinating sweep of Irish tunes that mixes jigs and reels with poignant passages before a jazzy up-tempo finale.
‘The Incredibles’ theme, composed by Michael Giachino, features great work from the cellos in conversation with the other strings, along with jagged rhythm and edgy chords that all end up with an abrupt over-and-out finish.
The concert also features individual talent. Ellie Greeham, Áine Crowley, Tisha Aruga, Saoirle Dennehy, Kate Doolan, Elizabeth Griffin and Amber Shamshad are all mightily impressive with their solo pieces.
The orchestras combine with Eimear Heaney as MD and Amber Shamshad leading for ‘Blazing Bows of the West!’ which has us all slapping the thighs and searching for the holster as iconic scores such as ‘The Magnificent Seven’, ‘How the West was Won’ and ‘The Big Country’ bring all the grandparents back to the-chap-and-the-wan days of the flicks. MD Eimear Heaney clearly believes in challenging her young players as the combined SETU Junior Orchestras see us out with a massive Can-Can from Offenbach’s Orpheus.
This is the meaning of outreach as far as any University is concerned – the introduction and involvement of students as young as nine years old in a music programme with quality tutors that develops all the talent they have in a planned and progressive way. Today’s SETU junior students may well be tomorrow’s future for the university. A foot in the door is everything.
