Primary News
ADOPT-A-PLAYER IN HULL
Supported by Manchester Airports Group
Hallé Education ran a mini ‘Adopt-a-Player’ project in Hull on 13 January 2012. Violinist Elizabeth Bosworth led a workshop based on the overture from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, with a Year 5 class from Wansbeck Primary School. In the evening the pupils went to the Hallé concert in Hull’s City Hall to hear the Orchestra perform this piece, along with R. Strauss’s Don Juan, the Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No.5.
START THE DAY THE HALLÉ WAY
Supported by the Peter Cunningham Memorial Fund
During the spring term, Hallé players Ewan Easton (Principal Tuba) and James Muirhead (clarinet) visited six schools in Bolton, Bury and Rochdale to present the ‘Start the Day the Hallé Way’ project.
Start the Day the Hallé Way is a performance-based project that aims to introduce school pupils to two musicians from the Hallé during a school assembly. The project lasts approximately one hour, in which the musicians introduce their instruments, talk about the Hallé and play music for the children. Ewan Easton and other musicians from the Hallé have led this project on numerous occasions in schools all over the North of England.
Aimed at Key Stages 1 and 2, the project is an interactive musical session packed with absorbing activities designed to cover key areas of the National Curriculum. Based on the motto ‘Music is Fun!’, audience participation is a key role in the presentation.
HALLÉ FOR YOUTH PROJECT
Every year the creative project connected to the Hallé for Youth concerts moves around the different boroughs of Greater Manchester. This season was the turn of Salford and Stockport and involved Woodley and Brookside Primary Schools from Stockport, and St. Joseph’s RC and The Friars Primary Schools from Salford. The project took four pieces of music from the concert programme and, working in partnership with the Northern Ballet School, the young people were given the opportunity to create their own music and dance pieces based on these orchestral works. Three musicians worked in each of the schools on the music project, students from the Northern Ballet School helped the children design their own choreography and Allison Clarke, a Manchester-based designer worked with the children on artwork and costumes.
The project culminated on the stage of The Bridgewater Hall on two occasions: in early March the children from the four schools performed their music and dance projects to an audience of parents and friends; over the following weeks, each school group performed their musical composition at one of the four Hallé for Youth concerts on 6, 7, 8 and 22 March 2012.
ADOPT-A-PLAYER IN OLDHAM
Supported by The Ernest Cook Trust
The Hallé flagship education project, Adopt-a-Player, took place in Oldham in the spring term. The project enables children from three inner-city primary schools and a high school to attend a concert at one of the UK’s finest music venues, The Bridgewater Hall, perhaps for the first time, and to take part in a creative music project with professional musicians from the Hallé. The pupils visited The Bridgewater Hall on 23 February to hear the Hallé perform a concert, which included Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute on which the creative project was based. The children continued the workshops with the adopted musician after the concert, composing their own music based on Mozart’s opera and The Magic Flute story. The culmination on 19 March took place at Saddleworth School and gave pupils an opportunity to showcase their hard work to family and friends.
This term’s schools and musicians were St. Anne’s CE Lydgate Primary (Steve Magee, bassoon), St. Thomas Leesfield CE Primary (Paulette Bayley, violin), Diggle Primary School (Becky Harney, ‘cello) and Saddleworth School (John Abendstern, percussion).
