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Coronavirus restrictions may have forced major changes to QE’s normal Christmas arrangements, but there was festive spirit aplenty in the final week of the Autumn Term.

Boys and staff enjoyed tucking into a Christmas lunch with all the trimmings. Year 7 boys enjoyed an adapted version of the carol service, held this year at the School, instead of at the parish church.

And QE’s commitment to service and the community was not forgotten: the normal Christmas collections for charity went ahead, with parents, boys and staff giving generously to support local people in need.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My congratulations and thanks go to everyone who has worked hard to ensure that, Covid-19 notwithstanding, the final week of term was as festive as ever. I wish everyone in our Elizabethan community a restful Christmas holiday at the end of this difficult year, and a healthy and happy 2021.”

In normal years, QE’s Service of Lessons and Carols takes place in St John the Baptist Church in Barnet, with a congregation including staff and all the Year 7 boys, as well as musicians and readers drawn from other year groups.

That was not possible this year, so QE brought the church to the School instead! Last week, a small group of senior musicians went to St John’s to pre-record two anthems.

These were then played between the carols, readings and antiphon performed live in this week’s Carol Service for the Year 7 year-group bubble.

“This gave our Year 13 boys a chance to sing at St John’s, and our Year 7s got to see what the church is like – on video at least,” the Headmaster said. “Hearing the carols ringing out from the Main School Hall lent a wonderfully festive atmosphere to the School, and our Year 7s savoured the opportunity to become part of this well-loved QE tradition.”

Readers included senior staff and 2020 School Captain Ivin Jose, with the Headmaster as usual giving the final Scripture reading, the famous prologue to John’s gospel.

The video segments featured the Year 13 Choir singing The First Nowell and Holst’s arrangement of the carol, Personent Hodie, from the Piae Cantiones collection of mediaeval songs.

The service also included performances of the popular traditional carols: Once in Royal David’s City; O Little Town of Bethlehem; O Come all ye Faithful, and Hark the Herald Angels Sing!

The Year 7 boys were mostly seated in the main floor area.

Social distancing was carefully observed: readings were given from the stage, while the musicians from other year groups – the choir, trumpeters and Year 12 Strings – were well spread.

Earlier in the week, pupils relished their Christmas lunch, with the catering team pulling out all the stops to serve up a festive feast of roast turkey or wild mushroom filo pastry crown, with pigs-in-blankets, stuffing, carrots, Brussel sprouts, parsnips, cranberry jelly and gravy, followed by Christmas pudding or yule log.

QE also continued with its annual collection for local charitable organisations, choosing this year to support Homeless Action in Barnet and Hornsey Parish Church, which is acting as a foodbank hub.

Parents, pupils and staff have been donating non-perishable food items, clothing and blankets over recent weeks, and yesterday a group of Year 9 volunteers helped to load a record number of bags into a QE minibus, ready for delivery.

Head of Extra-Curricular Enrichment Rebecca Grundy said: “We are very grateful to everyone who donated, and to our prefects and Year 9 helpers.

“This support will make a huge difference to vulnerable people this Christmas.”

Covid-19 caused the cancellation of the normal November Concert in front of a large audience in the Shearly Hall – but the Music department were determined not to be defeated by the pandemic. 

Director of Music Ruth Partington decided to use technology to showcase the boys’ musicianship and devised a creative way to recreate the experience of performing together.

Staff made special sound recordings over three days, featuring boys who had been rehearsing in their year group bubbles since September.  

Pupils from across the year groups were brought together in socially-distanced ensembles in two large venues, the Shearly Hall and Main School Hall.   

To recreate, so far as was possible, an authentic concert experience for the boys, they were asked to wear ‘concert dress’  – with white shirts, where available, instead of the normal light blue – and Music ties. 

The recordings were then put together as a high-quality soundtrack illustrated by photographs and broadcast as a YouTube Premiere in early December. The recording remains available on the Music Department’s YouTube channel. 

“We were determined to do our best to give all our musicians a collective ensemble experience and an opportunity to perform,” said Miss Partington. 

The virtual concert opened with a Best of Queen medley from the Junior Wind Band. 

It then featured contributions from the School Choir, Year 13 Choir, Junior Strings, Advanced Strings, Senior Orchestra and from the Gaubert Trio, who played Soir d’automne from Trois Aquarelles by the French composer, Philiippe Gaubert. 

Other works performed were by Grieg, Beethoven and Richard Rodgers (the Junior Strings’ performance of tunes from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma!). 

The QE Blues Band brought the 51-minute performance to an end in upbeat style with the 1958 Mexican-style hit, The Champs.  

After the success of those sessions, the Music department adopted a similar format for the end-of-term Christmas Concert.  

The Music department have adapted to Covid-19 conditions with the first-ever concert from the School to be live-streamed on YouTube.

The Senior Chamber Concert featured a restricted audience in the Main School Hall, but was also filmed and broadcast online so that the wider QE community could see it in real time.

Director of Music Ruth Partington said: “It is exciting to be live streaming to YouTube. As ever, the boys in the concert have been practising hard and they should all be congratulated on achieving such a high standard of performance.”

The programme for the first major concert of the academic year exclusively featured soloists, with 13 performances during the course of the early-evening event.

Playing instruments ranging from the electric guitar to the flute, they were drawn from Year 11 and the Sixth Form. The repertoire was similarly diverse, from Beethoven (Year 12 pianist Alex Woodcock performed the Sonata in G Op.14 Allegro) to contemporary American guitarist Steve Vai’s Die to Live (performed on the electric guitar by Kirtinandan Koramutla, of Year 11).

The concert, which ran for 1hr 17mins, opened with another electric guitar piece – Soma, by Simon Troup – played by Year 11’s Atul Kanodia.

The sole vocalist of the night was Shivas Patel, of Year 12, who performed songs by the 19^th German composer Robert Schumann (Ich Grolle Nicht from Dichterliebe) and his protégé and friend, Johannes Brahms (Ständchen).

Year 12 alto saxophonist Conor Parker-Delves brought the evening to a close with his performance of Pequeña Czarda by Pedro Iturralde, a Spanish saxophonist and composer celebrating his 91st birthday this year, who composed the virtuoso piece in 1949.

Mr Tadashi Imai, one of QE’s visiting music teachers, accompanied the soloists on the piano.

The technical operations, including the live-streaming of the concert on the QE Barnet Music YouTube channel, were run by Indrajit Datta of Year 10.

The concert is still available for viewing on the Music department’s YouTube channel.

A major milestone in the project to build a new, multi-million pound Music School at Queen Elizabeth’s School’s has been reached, with the first ‘concrete pour’ at the site.

Selected staff and pupils were on hand to celebrate the arrival of the concrete mixer – the first of some 150 lorryloads due at the School over the coming months!

Headmaster Neil Enright, who was among the group witnessing the historic event, said: “It is exciting that the construction phase of this major project is now well and truly under way.

“While the Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably caused a few complications, we have been very keen to press ahead with this project: it represents not only a significant investment in our facilities, but is also a sign of our confidence in the future at this difficult time.

“Indeed, while we have extensive precautions in place to keep everyone here safe from the virus, we are trying, so far as is possible, to ensure it is ‘business as usual’ for our boys, our focus remaining firmly on providing them with the best possible education.

“If all goes according to plan – Covid-permitting! – we should be able to open the new building during the 2021 Autumn Term.”

The £3.5m-plus project received the go-ahead in 2019 after the Department for Education accepted the School’s £2.2m bid (comprising a £1.2m grant and £1m loan).

Completion will involve substantial financial support through the Friends of Queen Elizabeth’s, thus continuing a long record of FQE backing which has been instrumental in ensuring the School has been able to open a succession of new facilities over the past 25 years.

The purpose-built Music School complex will provide essential support for QE’s booming Music department – until lockdown began earlier this year, there were more than 20 ensembles at the School, with over 160 boys singing in the Choir.

It will feature a new performance venue and a number of much-needed teaching and rehearsal rooms. In addition, the two-storey building will provide additional assembly space to accommodate QE’s lecture programme, as well as a covered atrium for boys to use at break times.

The School’s new Deputy Head (Operations), Tara O’Reilly, said: “The site has been ‘prepped’ and ready for building work to start for some time, so it is good to see the area now full of machinery and to be able to watch the construction team from our contractor, TJ Evers, who are all working hard to break ground and put in the foundations for the new building.”

Watching the concrete pour alongside the Headmaster and Ms O’Reilly were Director of Music Ruth Partington and Music teacher Caroline Grint, together with two of the School’s senior musicians, Year 12’s Raphael Herberg and Conor Parker-Delves, both of whom have just started their A-level Music studies.

Raphael said: “We are very excited about the new Music block,” while Conor added: “We are really glad this is happening for our Music Department, and that future QE students will get to enjoy it.”

When the emerging pandemic forced the cancellation of a concert at Abbey Ravenscroft Nursing Home, QE’s young musicians were determined not to let the residents down.

So, after boys from Year 7 through to Year 12 sent in a flood of videos of themselves performing at home, the Music department put together a special virtual concert, which was staged for the residents using YouTube’s Premiere function.

Head of Extra-curricular Enrichment Rebecca Grundy said: “We were delighted to reach out to the local community and help lift spirits at this difficult time. The virtual concert went well and the nursing home staff sent us their gratitude, saying that it was lovely to hear the boys’ music. They said we obviously have a lot of talented musicians.”

In fact, the initial concert only scratched the surface of the available material, as Miss Grundy explained: “I got such an amazing response from the boys that I sent the nursing home all of the recordings, so that they could do a series of concerts and choose the ones they wanted for each. They’ve got enough from the boys to keep them going for ages!”

Residents at the home, which has more than 100 rooms and is only a short walk from the School, will therefore be able to enjoy Music in a wide variety of genres played on a broad range of instruments, with an extensive repertoire ranging from a tabla accompaniment to Pharrell Williams’ Happy (played by Isher Jagdev, of Year 9) to the Étude in A Minor written for the piano by 19th century Danish composer Ludvig Schytte.

Other performances included Julius Ponen playing Scott Joplin’s much-loved 1902 ragtime piano classic, The Entertainer, and Year 11’s Shivas Patel who not only played Oskar Merikanto’s Valse Lente in Bb major on the piano but also sang Brahms’ Ständchen (Serenade) in German.

The School’s Saxophone Ensemble have been named among the 2020 Chamber Champions in the prestigious Pro Corda Music Festival.

After participating in a highly competitive semi-final at Westminster School, Nathan Woodcock of Year 9, Conor Parker-Delves of Year 11 and Ifeatu Obiora and Drew Sellis, both of Year 13, qualified for the final, which had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 virus restrictions.

Following the cancellation, the Pro Corda educational charity took the decision to name all the finalists ‘2020 Chamber Champions’, stating on its website: “It was one of the highest-standard festivals yet, so all the groups who reached the final pulled off a stunning achievement.”

Director of Music Ruth Partington said: “I congratulate the boys on this fantastic achievement, especially as this was their very first attempt in this competition.”

At the final, which was to have taken place at Sevenoaks School, the Saxophone Ensemble had planned to perform Sonata, First Movement by Phil Woods, arranged by Wilson.

The saxophonists comprised one of the three QE ensembles to reach the competition’s semi-finals, together with the String Quartet and the Celli Ensemble. Each of these ensembles had received expert feedback from the first round.

“All three ensembles took advantage of this advice to refine their performances still further and performed very well indeed,” said Miss Partington, adding that, although they did not reach the final, the String Quartet “played the best they have ever played”.

Established in 1969, Pro Corda provides musical training for a wide range of young people through ensemble training and performance, specialising in chamber music.