Situated close to the fashionable areas of Upper Street and Camden Passage, the Queens Head in Islington has stood proud on the Essex Road for centuries and is regarded as not only a local pub but also an institution.  It is rumoured that the pub may have once been owned, and possibly lived in, by Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom the license is said to have been given by Queen Elizabeth I.

Offering its guests just the right mix of glamour and cool, while remaining cosy and comfortable, the Queens Head has been ornamented with quirky antiques, bespoke chandeliers and vintage sofas.  Much notice is paid to the beautiful fireplace, which dates back to the 1600s, as well as the gothic altar which towers behind the bar and, of course, no centuries-old pub is complete without a few ghost stories.

Not only providing customers with much sought after Sunday roasts and treasured pints, this venue presents many regular events.  There are weekly DJ nights, pub quizzes and occasional vintage fairs. Comedy gigs are often hosted here alongside speed-dating evenings. Up and coming musicians, as well those already established, including Belle and Sebastien and Noah and the Whale, play gigs in the mirrored upper room. The pub has also become a favourite haunt for photo shoots and various filming projects.

Along with the standard pub pastimes of eating, boozing and dancing, why not come down on 22^nd February and enjoy ‘a side of different’ with your alcohol. Rock up to the Queens Head and savour the OAE’s tribute to Purcell – the ‘Best of British’ in a beloved British pub.

There’ll be a full performance of Bach’s Suite No.3, famous for including Air on a G string, as well as his hugely popular Brandenburg Concerto No.5, with chat between director Laurence Cummings, the players, and the audience who can come and go with drinks and clap at will.

Beforehand, from 9pm, eclectic band Silvermoths play the foyer, and afterwards a DJ set from Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne until midnight.

For further information contact Katy Bell or Natasha Stehr on 07834 603 444/020 7239 9374 or email katy.bell@oae.co.uk /natasha.stehr@oae.co.uk

For full information, please download the Listings release Night Shift 4 Marchhere.

Anthem for a Child is the OAE’s most ambitious education project to date, consisting of a nationwide series of workshops and concerts for as many as 5000 children, and students, of all ages.  Anthem endeavours to engage young people with music and aims to leave behind an excitement for the making of music long after they have completed their projects.  The Anthem tour focuses on two especially commissioned pieces by the composer James Redwood – a fanfare, Twangling Instruments, based on Caliban’s speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (during which the children will have the opportunity to play their instruments alongside members of the OAE) and My Cry, a song which all the children will learn…and I found myself happily joining in too – the atmosphere was so remarkably infectious!

The children began with Twangling Instruments, and were encouraged to get out their violins, cellos and recorders.  Cue further excitement and delighted giggling as the children prepared to join the Orchestra with the piece they had been practising hard for weeks.  Half of the group of youngsters formed the choir and the theme for the rest of the concert was laid out – the importance of working as a team.  The children were asked to identify how many ‘teams’ they could hear within the Orchestra itself and these various ‘teams’ were put ‘under the microscope’, where the specific job of each was pointed out.  The oboes were observed working in parallel, the strings were counted and the members of the bass ‘team’ (bassoon, cello and harpsichord) were examined also.  The emphasis was placed on how each team/instrument had an important job to do on its own and, as a result, they contributed to the sound of the piece as a whole – their individual voices, together, played as one sound.  There were further pieces played to demonstrate how the sections of the Orchestra work independently to create the complete sound of a musical piece.  The children were then taught a rhyme and divided into two sections, to sing the ‘canon’. Again myself, and other members of the OAE team, were happy to join in with the rhyme and actions.

It was the vocal fanfare, My Cry, which concluded the concert.  The children had learned sections of this ‘anthem’ in class in advance of the day and it was as though they couldn’t wait to sing it, they got up from their seats with such excitement.  The words to this piece are inspiring and enriching and celebrate what it means to sing – the power of the voice on its own and the collective strength of a choir as a whole.  It was moving to hear this group of children so proudly and enthusiastically singing the words ‘My voice is mine and it is me’.  I began to feel almost envious that I had not been involved in such a project as this when I had been at school, and it served to renew my own pleasure for singing.  Anthem will no doubt prove to be a successful undertaking for the OAE and I feel honoured to have experienced it at its beginning.

Adriana Maestranzi, Communications Assistant

The broadcast went out last week but we’ve got it here on our soundcloud page for your listening pleasure.
The Night Shift on Resonance FM’s Clear Spot:15th Feb 2012 by The Night Shift

William Norris, Night Shift Creative Director

The next stop on The Night Shift Pub Tour sees the OAE head to the heart of Soho in London’s West End.

Inspired by the life and times of Oscar Wilde (whose adoring fans would wear a green carnation buttonhole to display their unwavering admiration for him) this is not your average bar. On the spot where Soho Square meets the archway of Manette Street, in a townhouse which long ago provided the living quarters for the adjoining church, the Green Carnation is a unique venue.

Decadence and flamboyance are the order of the day at the Green Carnation.  Festooned with velvet armchairs and flocked wallpaper, its walls adorned with notable quotes of the poet and playwright, and enveloped in the plush tones of black, burgundy and bottle green, it is evident that stylish and witty debauchery is most welcome here.

Guests are offered the chance to relax and indulge themselves in the swish, chilled out lounge bar or they can choose to ‘go Wilde’ on the dance floor.  The Green Carnation welcomes the well-known faces of such celebs as Sophie Ellis Bextor, the Hoosiers and the Sugababes as well as providing an after-work watering hole for the casts of local West End shows (who, if you’re lucky, will jump onto the piano to treat you to a spontaneous showcase).  The Green Carnation hosts regular poetry evenings and light hearted cabaret, which provide a welcome addition to the usual DJ bar schedule.

Head down to the Green Carnation on 21 February.  Wear your buttonholes with pride! Indulge in a lavender martini and raise a glass to the OAE’s tribute to the ‘Best of the Rest!’.

His music: Many of Berlioz’s contemporaries were dumbfounded by his music, including Mendelssohn and Chopin, who thought him reckless and lacking in talent. What might have seemed grossly-orchestrated, loosely structured and messy works on the surface were actually conceived with a pioneering knowledge of orchestral sound – both aesthetic and scientific. This Berlioz combined with a heart-on-sleeve sense of narrative often forged on the anvil of his own life experience. The composer’s ability to transfer concepts, feelings and stories from real life and from other art forms into music was unique. His operas, choral works, tone-poems and symphonies are unmistakable and striking. Many of them were conceived on an epic scale and made huge technical demands on their performers.

Himself: Berlioz was a larger-than-life character: unusually tall, extraordinarily determined and career-threateningly impulsive – especially when it came to women. The great German poet Heinrich Heine described the Frenchman as ‘like an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle’. Intriguingly though, Berlioz remains perhaps the only major composers never to have mastered a musical instrument.

On Thursday 23 February, at the Anvil, Basingstoke and at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 26 February, we’re playing Berlioz’s Romeo & Juliet, one of his most ambitious compositions whose lush, extravagant and even avant-garde nature pushes the Orchestra to its technical limits.

Main Programme

Programme Slip

His ‘enormous shock of light-brown hair, against the fantastic wealth of which the barber could do nothing’ reminds us that Berlioz was a Romantic to the core.  Despite a poor grasp of English (at best), he seems to have had something of a penchant for Blighty – he was obsessed by Shakespeare, and even more obsessed by Harriett Smithson, the Irish actress he eventually married.  In his youth, his life was full of passion, love and energy, however in his old age he cut a rather more pessimistic figure.  In 1865 he bluntly noted ‘All my musical undertakings are finished; I have no desire to do anything more.  And all I now do is to read, meditate, struggle against daily weariness, and suffer ceaseless agonies from incurable neuralgia.’

Berlioz / The Music

Underrated for too long, his music is currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance with an increasing number of pieces joining the already popuylar Symphonie Fantastique in concert programmes. The main source of his musical inspiration was Beethoven who had freed the symphony from its 18^th century constraints.  Berlioz’s large-scale orchestral pieces are some of his most powerful, being at once intensely personal and brilliantly grandiose.  The inheritor of his musical legacy was undoubtedly Wagner.  The title page of Tristan and Isolde is inscribed:

To the dear and great author of
Romeo and Juliet
from the grateful author of
Tristan and Isolde

At the Night Shift at the Roundhouse we’re playing extracts from Romeo & Juliet, one of his most ambitious compositions whose lush, extravagant and even avant-garde nature pushes the Orchestra to its technical limits.

Director Laurence Cummings will give a guided tour of Bach’s ever popular Brandenburg Concerto No.5, complete with musical examples by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) and also Suite No.3, famous for including Air on a G String. The musical tour will be followed by a performance of the two pieces.

For further information contact Katy Bell or Natasha Stehr on 07834 603 444/020 7239 9374 or email katy.bell@oae.co.uk /natasha.stehr@oae.co.uk

For full information, please download the Press release The Works explores Air on a G String here.