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| September 2016 |
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Paul Daniel and Chi-chi Nwanoku from the BBC's Great Orchestra Challenge offer their 15 tips for surviving in an amateur orchestra.
- Turn up early. Music, and your part in it, needs time – to get your brain ready, as much as your reeds or strings.
- Be prepared. Look at your part (many can be found on the public domain music site IMSLP) and listen to the pieces (try YouTube or Spotify) beforehand.
- Never be without a pencil to take notes during rehearsals. There's too much going on to trust to memory.
- Practise breathing together with others in your section to begin shared phrases. Strings included.
- Develop peripheral awareness: you can hear and experience every note being played in the room if you put your mind to it. The orchestra then becomes one single wonderful instrument.
- Develop peripheral vision: keep an eye not only on the conductor, but on section leaders and the leader. Avoid playing before them. There are no prizes for who gets there first.
- Try memorising a little more of every phrase each time you repeat it in rehearsal. Music made without reading takes on a entirely new dimension: orchestral musicians need their printed parts far less than they might think. It’s great for members of the audience, too, if they can see your face.
- When the conductor stops, stop playing. Immediately.
- Listen to what else is going on in the orchestra - it gives more relevance and dimension to your own line. Have a full score to hand, to check and refer to. The different instructions (particularly dynamics and phrasing marks) across the other parts will be revelatory.
- Help your partner or neighbour count rests. Even in the strings, where life is far busier, you can always help your partner by pointing out where you're starting.
- In the wind and brass sections, work out a routine between yourselves for tuning. Trust others to hear tuning difficulties that you may not hear while making your own (musical) noise!
- In the strings, act like a top-drawer orchestra by learning how to transfer new bowings down the line from the front desk without speaking.
- When in doubt, leave it out. Go through the motions, but avoid losing pace because you'll get behind the rest of the musicians.
- Get page corners ready to turn in advance.
- And finally ... Smile! You cannot overestimate the impact of a joyful performance on your audience.
Source: The Guardian 1 September 2016
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| March 2015 |
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St Giles Orchestra was again invited by the Abingdon Music Festival to be the ochestra for the Maestro 2013 conducting masterclass and competition, involving playing a selction of Viennese music for young conductors under the age of 16, some of whom had never conducted an orchestra before. The winners, James Anderson-Besant and Adam Hargreaves won the opportunity to conduct pieces in SGO's January 2016 public concert. Runner up Elizabeth Nurse won the chance to conduct a two-hour rehearsal with SGO.
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| April 2014 |
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St Giles Orchestra teamed up with Bicester Choral and Operatic Society and Wantage Choral Society for a performance of Verdi's Requiem in Oxford Town Hall. Conductor Geoffrey Bushell awarded an antique baton on this the 30th anniversary of his first concert with SGO.
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| June 2013 |
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Conductor and Musical Director Geoffrey Bushell celebrates 30 years conducting St Giles Orchestra.
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| March 2013 |
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St Giles Orchestra was invited by the Abingdon Music Festival to be the ochestra for the Maestro 2013 conducting masterclass and competition, involving playing Wagner's Mastersingers Overture and Tchaikovsky's Symphony no 3 for six aspiring conductors, some of whom had never conducted an orchestra before. Chris Nurse won the opportunity to conduct Wagner's Tannhauser Overture with SGO in January 2015, and runner-up Gabs Damiani won a two-hour rehearsal with SGO.
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| February 2013 |
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St Giles Orchestra helped local cellist and luthier Jonathan Beecher of to record Saint Saens Cello Concerto no 1, to enable Jonathan to experiment with different techniques to improve the projection and sound quality of the cello in a concerto setting.
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| June 2012 |
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St Giles Orchestra was invited to record Walton's Coronation march "Crown Imperial" for the BBC One Show.
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| May 2012 |
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St Giles Orchestra was invited to record a song by Johnny Martin being submitted to Pinewood Studios for the new James Bond film Skyfall. We spent an evening at the SAE Instutite's professional recording studio and also contibuted to a DVD they were preparing.
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| January 2012 |
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 St Giles Orchestra performs the Delius Double Concerto with Charles Mutter and Katharine O'Kane as part of the Delius 150th anniversary celebrations. SGO is awarded a certificate by the Delius Society for its contribution to this event and for championing Delius in previous concerts. We are in good company - other winners of a certificate include the Three Choirs Festival, The New London Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé, Classic FM, Julian Lloyd Webber, Raphael Wallfisch, BBC Radio 3 and THe Philharmonia.
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| November 2009 |
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Geoffrey Bushell conducts his 100th concert of St Giles Orchestra.
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| March 2008 |
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St Giles Orchestra's website has moved to www.stgilesorchestra.org.uk. After eight years of being hosted by an internet service provider, we found we were falling behind in search engine rankings, which meant it was difficult for people to find the site when using common searches such as 'oxford orchestra'. So we decided it was time to get the site properly hosted and with a more relevant domain name. Our webmaster, Geoffrey Bushell (also our conductor and musical director!) first created our website in 1999 and has now created the new version. Over the years, our website has attracted many new players, more soloists than we can cope with, and requests from choirs and other partners to hire the orchestra.
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| June 2007 |
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We gave the first amateur UK performance of Frank Bridge's "Isabella".
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| January 2006 |
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We gave only the second amateur UK performance of Alfvén's "A Legend of the Skerries".
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| September 2004 |
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Our list of forthcoming concerts has been updated to include links to clips and opportunities to buy CDs of the works we will be performing. These pieces are marked with the  icon.
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| July 2004 |
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We believe we gave the first UK amateur performance of Bruch's Symphony no 2.
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| April 2004 |
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Our list of forthcoming concerts has been updated to include the ranking in the  2004. This shows that over half of our forthcoming pieces are amongst the top 300 of the most popular works as voted for by Classic FM listeners.
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| April 2004 |
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St Giles Orchestra has been awarded grants by both Didcot Town Council and South Oxfordshire District Council for its Didcot concert on 9 October 2004.
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| February 2004 |
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Congratulations to former SGO members Lorna Dick (horn) and Jonathan Duke (trumpet) on their engagement. Allegedly, Lorna proposed to Jonathan on 29 February! Lorna and Jonathan met at an SGO rehearsal and have since moved to Manchester, and now Scotland.
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| January 2004 |
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8 January saw a new record of 21 violinists at a regular rehearsal (51 players in all)!
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| May 2003 |
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St Giles Orchestra gave what it believes was the first amateur performance of a rarely heard Tchaikovsky symphony in the UK. Not only did Tchaikovsky write six numbered symphonies and another entitled 'Manfred', but he started work in 1892 on a Symphony in E flat. Finding the work troublesome to compose, he decided to scrap it, even going as far as to state that he had destroyed the sketches. But the sketches were not destroyed, and they were discovered many years later by the Russian musicologist and composer Semyon Bogatyryev, who reconstructed the work from the sketches in the 1950s.
Geoffrey Bushell, St Giles Orchestra's conductor and musical director explains: "When looking to hire a set of parts for the symphony, we first searched a database of all orchestral music in UK lending libraries, and found that there was only one set.
When we received the set of orchestral parts of this symphony from Liverpool Library, we noticed that it was in mint condition, with no marks of any kind in either score or parts, and had obviously never been played. The library had acquired the set in 1963, only two years after The State Music Publishers in Moscow published the full score. I was also told by John Koelsch, a Tchaikovsky enthusiast living in Wells, Nevada, USA (who had noticed the concert advertised on our website) that the first western performance was in 1962. This combination of circumstances made us think that perhaps we were about to give the first amateur performance in the UK, all of 46 years after the first performance." Geoffrey then contacted Brett Langston, biographer of Tchaikovsky and author of the two-volume Tchaikovsky Handbook, to see if any other performances were known. Brett replied "The symphony has been professionally performed by The BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2002 and by the Ulster Orchestra in the 1990s, but those are the only other British performances I know of. Because the work is so rarely heard, there must be a very good chance that your performance will be the first by an amateur orchestra in this country!"
So the St Giles Orchestra concert on Saturday 5 July (7.30 pm in St Andrews Church, Linton Road, Oxford was a very special occasion. Geoffrey Bushell adds: "We like to introduce our audiences to unfamiliar works, and although they may not know the work, they nearly always say to me afterwards that they enjoyed it because it has a good tune." There are certainly plenty of tunes in the symphony, and its style is recognisably Tchaikovsky. So if you missed this unique event, it may be another 46 years before the next opportunity!
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