University News Last updated 20 June
Friends,
Welcome to RBC This Week on the last day of the academic year. Our assessments and recitals are all complete, and staff and students are ready for a well-deserved break.
We have two further happy annual events today (Friday 20 June). This afternoon we will be holding the RBC Awards ceremony, recognising the high achievements of our students over the last year and presenting prizes to around 100 of them.
For the first time, we have widened the scope of this event to include live performances and a conversation with three alumni who will be receiving Honorary Fellowships of RBC.
This evening the RBC Symphony Orchestra will give a very special end of term concert in which the conducting duties will be shared between Daniele Rosina and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s (CBSO) Music Director Kazuki Yamada. Kazuki, who will conducting a concert with our students for the first time, has been a genial and energising presence at his rehearsals this week. I can’t wait to hear their account of Dvorak’s Symphony No.8, as well as some short brass pieces by Kazuki’s compatriot Takemitsu.
The first half of the concert concludes with a perfect work to celebrate a long year of music-making: The Serenade to Music by Vaughan Williams, composed for 16 of the finest singers of the time in 1938 and today performed by 16 of our own brilliant vocal students.
Other highlights over the last month have included The Ghost Algorithm, a stylish new work devised and performed by our first-year Applied Theatre students; a pair of entertaining concerts at Symphony Hall by our Banda Brasileira and RBC Folk Ensemble – amazingly, their very first concert there – as part of last month’s Serendipity Festival; our summer opera, a delightful pairing of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with Ethel Smyth’s Fête Galante; a successful production of Schnitzler’s play La Ronde; and a moving account of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time played by three students plus our Head of Strings Nick Trygstad. And next week I am looking forward to my first long overdue encounter with Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
But it’s not all about public performances. Many students have been working hard at building their portfolio in composition or music technology, or building their business plans and final projects. They have also engaged throughout the year in their academic work, and in honing their craft well away from a live audience. All of this progress is important too, and as they depart for their summer break – during which many students will, of course, be performing and learning elsewhere in the world –I’d like to thank them all for their commitment to their studies and to RBC over the last year. And after a brief rest: Roll on September!
Stephen Maddock
RBC Principal