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 19th 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.