Ralph Allwood

Alex Stobbs suffers from Cystic Fibrosis. Channel Four made a documentary - A Boy Called Alex - at the end of which, after his conducting of a performance of the Bach Magnificat, he was asked: "So, what's next, Alex?" He replied, straight at the camera, "The Matthew Passion. All three hours of it."

Rodolfus Choir will enable him to conduct this great work, and we invite you to help him too.

Find out more about the project at www.stobbs-matthewpassion.co.uk and A Boy Called Alex.

This summer's six week-long courses maintained last year's record number of students, 389 in all. I estimate that around a third were from state schools. Four of the courses were directed by Ralph Allwood, two by Ben Parry, who takes over as Director of the Junior Academy in January 2009. Each course is run by twelve staff consisting of director, assistant director and accompanist, three full-time singing teachers, an administrator and six assistant music staff to direct consort groups and accompany singing lessons.

Course 1 of 2008, directed by Ben Parry, revealed a larger choir than is usual so early in the summer holidays - nearly 60 singers. The majority had already started school holidays but many had taken time off school (with permission!), some even returning to school after the course had finished. Chris Whitton (OE), lecturer in Classics at Cambridge and Director of Music at Emanuel College was once again the organist and assistant director. We were treated to a wonderful workshop by Sarah Fox, a former Choral Course student, whose opera career is in the ascendant. Simon Toyne (OE), now Director of Music at Tiffin School and Kingston Parish Church, took a lively and informative full choir rehearsal in College Chapel. The choir sang Choral Evensong in rain-soaked Oxford at Christ Church Cathedral, conducted by the affable Director of Music, Stephen Darlington. The service consisted of Renaissance music directly associated with the cathedral by Dering, Ayleward and Purcell. On the final day, the choir performed a recital in Eton College Chapel entitled 'On wings of song' - choral song settings from Schubert, Parry and Vaughan Williams to popular African song arrangements by Mike Brewer.

The highlight of the second course was to broadcast Evensong live for Radio 3. We sang an almost all-German programme whose climax was "Warum" by Brahms. We visited St John's, Cambridge to sing Evensong with Andrew Nethsinger, and Francis Grier was our guest conductor for an afternoon. We had an excellent and very amusing Masterclass from Iris Dell’Acqua. This was a course with a high concentration of good musicians.

The choir on course 3 was one of the strongest at sight-reading that the Director, Ben Parry, had come across. This was a bonus in that the choir worked towards three (rather than the usual two) main events - a BBC recording, Choral Evensong and a recital. This was also the 'organists' course, that section directed by David Goode. Jeanette Ager (a former student of the choral courses) gave an interesting vocal masterclass. Gillian Dibden, for many years the director of the Berkshire Youth Choir, took a full choir rehearsal. Jeremy Filsell, lately a lay clerk at Windsor and soon to become a Director of Music in Washington DC, gave a masterclass for the organists, who themselves gave an excellent recital in College Chapel. Much of Sunday afternoon was spent recording two programmes of BBC Radio 4's Sunday Half Hour, which included a selection of hymns and short anthems on the themes of All Saints and Martin Luther. The student organists were of a sufficiently high standard to participate in these recordings, which were highly enjoyable and very well-sung. The full choir visited Oxford again (this time in hot sunshine) to sing Choral Evensong in Queen's College Chapel under the direction of Dr Owen Rees. On the final day of the course, the students gave a recital in College Chapel on the theme of the Virgin Mary - Marian choral music by Monteverdi, Bruckner Britten, Bax and James MacMillan as well as organ music and poetry.

The fourth course was held as part of the Three Choirs Festival, this year held at Worcester. We sang late night Compline in the cathedral to a large congregation, and a recital to a full Tewkesbury Abbey at the end of the course. A musical highlight was "One foot in Eden still I stand" by Nicholas Maw and singing Tallis encircling the audience. We stayed at Dean Close School, where we were very well looked after. 

The fifth course was held for the first time in Oxford. Owen Rees at Queen's and Roger Allen at St Peter's had combined to take the initiative and ensure that it ran very smoothly. Ben Nicholas visited to direct Evensong in Queen's Chapel, and we sang a recital in Merton Chapel, with its wonderful acoustic. One of the pieces was the wonderfully atmospheric Hymnus, by Richard Quesnel. We also had an event at the Music Faculty (a Master Class from Robin Bowman), a choir workshop from Adrian Partington and sang at Christ Church Cathedral. We are all keen for the Oxford course to be repeated next year. 

The last course was held for the second year running in Cambridge. It was based in Trinity but involved Caius, St Catharine's, King's and Queens' Colleges too. We sang a recital in Trinity with a specially commissioned anthem from Joanna Marsh. Susan MacCulloch gave a very engaging and informative master class at Keynes Hall in King's College. Sir David Willcocks made an unscheduled visit to work on Naylor: Vox dicentis and conduct it in the recital. The singers were very moved to be able to sing with such a distinguished choral director. Michael Chance gave a most helpful and inspiring master class in the hall at Queens' College. Geffrey Webber directed Evensong in Caius Chapel to round off the course.

The strength of the courses lies in the high musical standards we aim for and achieve through the efforts of the dedicated and highly professional staff we are able to attract. Spread over the six courses, with some of them teaching on more than one course, were thirteen singing teachers, twenty assistant music staff, ten house staff and six organists and accompanists, organised administratively by Martina Prokesova and Vicky Savage.

Next year, we plan that the three courses away from Eton will be held at Durham, Oxford and Cambridge. One of them will be the hundredth course that has been held since they began in 1980. 

Ralph Allwood 

Those who saw the Alex Stobbs documentary may remember the question posed to Alex by the director, Stephen Walker from behind the camera after the performance, "So, what's next, Alex?" And his determined reply, "The Matthew Passion. All three hours of it". 5th April 2009, Cadogan Hall, Rodolfus Choir, the trebles of Eton College Chapel Choir, Michael Chance, Counter Tenor (other soloists not yet confirmed) South Bank Sinfonia, Ralph Allwood, (Assistant Conductor).

Channel Four have asked Stephen Walker for another documentary, and no doubt that performance will feature. I had said to him, "the St John Passion (2 hours) is a great piece, Alex". He looked at me, perplexed and aghast. So it's the Matthew. "Most people cut the Matthew down a bit, Alex". . . .

Alex has asked for it to be in aid of Cystic Fibrosis Research, but before CF get a penny we need to raise £38000 to put the concert on. Martin Denny, who runs the Windsor Festival, is Event Manager. Backing him up by spearheading the fundraising is the tireless Heather Davies. Please get straight in touch with her if you would like to contribute. She is heatherdavies@dsl.pipex.com.

Sometimes the coming together of a group of talented student musicians and a great work which few of them have performed before can, by generating a unique sense of discovery, produce very exciting results. This is certainly the case with Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 (Signum SIGCD111, rec 2007, 90'). Ralph Allwood's Rodolfus Choir sing with an infectious freshness and enthusiasm which communicates something of the OEshock of the new¹ surely created by the first performance of this astonishing compendium of the latest sacred styles. The choir's clear, bright tone and springy rhythmic energy, fully matched by the instrumentalists of the Southern Sinfonia and English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, give the opening Deus in adjutorium its essential electrifying effect, and, along with their splendidly precise chordal declamation and admirable vocal agility, produce compellingly vigorous and ardent performances of the large-scale psalms and the Magnificat, with thrilling climaxes and beautifully judged responses to all Monteverdi's touches of word-painting, which convey both the overwhelming grandeur and the delicate expressiveness of his music. Transitions of speed and style are particularly well managed, so that episodic pieces such as Dixit Dominus are satisfyingly coherent, and have a real sense of drama.

This meticulous and sensitive attention to detail also characterizes the motets, whether in the gently caressing Nigra sum, the luxuriantly languorous Pulchra es, or the quietly meditative Audi coelum, all of which strike just the right balance between devotional fervour and secular sensuality. Performances of the Vespers which avoid all the pitfalls presented by its mixture of styles are rarer than they ought to be; this one, in its understanding that even when the words are sacred Latin rather than amorous Italian, they are still the key to unlocking the full expressive potential of Monteverdi's music, comes as close to doing so as the most captious critic could possibly wish.
Elizabeth Roche

We started early from Gatwick on the last day of the Lent Half with a choir of thirty with David Goode, Andrew Maynard and Ralph Allwood. We sang in the grand Dom Seniorow old people's home in Krakow and received an early taste of the warm reception we were to receive everywhere. It was both interesting and moving to sing to a small but highly appreciative audience in the Galicia Jewish Museum. Early on a freezing Good Friday we descended 160 metres to the Wieliczka Salt Mine and sang in a huge chapel lit by chandeliers deep under the earth. Later we joined in the two-hour Veneration of the Cross in St Catherine's Church. Bruckner: Christus factus est was particularly exciting in the huge acoustic, and the choir for this tour was characterised by its musicianship and power. The climax of Lotti: Crucifixus coincided powerfully with the symbolic procession, with the Good Friday substitution of rattles for bells, to Christ's tomb.

We had prepared carefully for our visit to Auschwitz on Holy Saturday. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a one-time 16-year-old prisoner saved from certain death only by her ability to play the cello, and later a regular member of the English Chamber Orchestra had spoken to us in Eton of her grim experiences. Our fascinating, charming and kindly courier, Alina Peretti, had been a 14-year-old prisoner there, and her sister had been murdered four days before the Russians came. She gave us some flowers to lay, but declined to join us that morning. As she spoke to us she was clearly moved in thanking our young people for their singing at the same time as she related a small part of her experiences. Leaving cameras behind we silently followed our quietly-spoken guide for two hours as he showed us round the site of the worst cruelty known to man, where at least 1,200,000 people had been murdered. We chose the execution square for Alina's flowers and Charlie Stacey, our cello-playing youngest singer, to lay them. It took several hours for the party to blink its way back into exuberant life, ready to sing for the Easter Sunday service at St Joseph's Church. We sang Mozart's youthful Missa Brevis and the Handel Hallelujah Chorus with the spontaneously requested extra music we have come to enjoy on these occasions. Afterwards we gave a short recital including Alex Jones' excellent singing of Vaughan Williams' "Rise, heart, thy Lord is risen" and "Dum transisset sabbatum" by John Taverner, now traditional on Easter tours, and were greeted by a standing ovation.

After a guided tour of Wroclaw the next day we gave a concert as part of the Wieczory Tumskie Festival. Having stood in a cold vestry for an hour waiting for a lecture to finish we sang for ninety minutes with a break only for Michael Heighway to play Bach's Toccata in F.

Travelling to Poznan the group met their hosts for the next three nights, and later joined with the Poznan Nightingales, the best of the three men and boys' choirs in Poznan, with their 88-year-old conductor Stefan Stuligrosz. Their sound was powerful, dark, wonderfully blended and intense, and their style strongly influenced our subsequent singing. We joined together for the final three items and received a generous standing ovation. Polish choral singing became important in Poznan in the 18th century during the Prussian occupation. The Polish language had been banned in public, but, in defiance, Poles noted that this hated regulation didn't extend to singing. Next day we sang in the beautiful University Concert Hall, once again with the Poznan Nightingales, moving on the next day to Warsaw.

On Saturday 29th March we joined with the Il Tempo Baroque Orchestra in the Chopin Academy of Music for a benefit concert in aid of the Laski School for Blind Children. The ensemble of period instruments played delightfully. A musical highlight of the tour was Henry Vaughan's singing of 'Vouchsafe O Lord' as part of the Purcell Te Deum accompanied exquisitely by baroque strings, theorbo and chamber organ. We shared our Warsaw hotel with a rowdy school party who happened to turn up at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto that morning at the same time as us. They were Israeli, and now, with reverence, they laid wreaths and sang. We also visited the completely rebuilt old city, systematically destroyed by the Nazis in revenge for the brave 1944 uprising. Our final event was Mass and a recital at the Laski School's Church on Sunday 30th March, way out in the sunny countryside and attended by nuns and blind children from the community in their small simple church built in the 1920's. The blind children's obvious deep appreciation of our singing was very moving. The nuns guided the children in singing and reading from braille. The Incognitos, so often an important and popular part of our programmes, sang three songs in our concert after mass to enthusiastic applause.

I'd like to pay tribute to Alex's Jones' excellent leadership of the group. It is an exacting job, and one which needs tact as well as forethought. A final dinner at a lovely restaurant in an imaginatively converted fire station enabled us to thank Alina and Martin, our gentle (but karate champion) coach driver and rounded off a tour which we will remember not only for the wonderful buildings in which we were privileged to sing to such warm appreciation, but also for the occasions on which we were able to get closer to human beings not only far from our land but far from our own culture and experience.

I am wary of speaking to people on aeroplanes. With the prospect of five hours when I can sit, alone with my book, and be fed, there is too much at stake. Any vestige of sunny affability gets checked in with my baggage, and I read. But I made an exception eighteen months ago when the person next to me clearly had the same idea. Briefly greeting him I settled down in my seat. He gave me a desultory grunt and nod and turned back to his book. "Aha, a kindred spirit!'', I thought, noticing also that the book anxiously waiting on his lap to be read interested me. So, to his thinly-disguised irritation, I started a jolly conversation. We talked for four hours. Stephen Walker and his wife Sally run Walker-George Films, making documentaries. Among his latest have been one on George Melly, on old people forming rock bands and a punk Rocker learning to conduct an orchestra. He is also a novelist: "Countdown to Hiroshima", notably. After an hour or so of conversation I had an idea.

We have here at Eton a series of seven or so 'ECMS' concerts each year devised and organised by senior boys and performed by boys of all ages. They are supposed to be chamber concerts, but we often make exceptions. A few weeks before my fateful flight, a boy had come to me asking to conduct the Bach Magnificat. "Oh come on, Alex," I replied, while impressed with his pluck, "I could give you plenty of pieces by Bach which would be so much easier and no less musically satisfying". No, it had to be the Magnificat. So, playing for time, I told him that if he could get the permission of the Head of Wind and Brass and the Head of Strings, he could do it. Hah, that'll put paid to his idea! But two days later he came back to me with a victorious grin. Digging a feeble final ditch, I asked him if he had a boy in mind who could sing the tough aria 'Deposuit', and did that boy’s teacher approve? Yes, yes, yes. And he produced From his inside pocket a (. . . draft, I delicately pointed out) list of players and singers.

Now this would be a merry little story of everyday music department cut-and-thrust if it weren't for the tragic sting in the tail. As most of us now know, this friendly, intensely musical, intelligent and highly enthusiastic boy, Alexander Stobbs, has the lung-wasting condition known as cystic fibrosis.

If you had met Stephen Walker and his wife Sally on one of their many subsequent visits to the Brompton Hospital or to Eton to film Alex with his friends, teachers and fellow musicians, you would have been forgiven for an impression that they were kindly aunt and uncle. Every move they made was in Alex's best interests, and they became firm friends of doctors, nurses, family and colleagues. The Magnificat performance itself, filmed in Eton College Chapel last March, was a triumph, and three million people have now seen the resulting documentary. Alex has since had three offers of marriage and an offer to write a book. The most moving comment that I heard was from a psychotherapist, who reported that one of her patients made a turn for the better after seeing the film, and is now recovering. And the extraordinary thing is that, yes, the odds are that a coincidences of some sort is bound to happen from time to time, but I now know that of all the people who could have made this documentary, Stephen Walker was by far the best.

It was meant to happen.