Ring-a-Ring o'Roses

This is one of our most popular programmes, fun for children and adults alike – baroque with a touch of panto!

Here, Artistic Director Wendy Hancock explains how it all came about:

Apart from the original idea of translating our CD ‘Ring a Ring a Roses’ into a concert at all, all the credit for this new and highly imaginative programme must go largely to Michael Sanderson, with ample assistance from Julia Black.

Long after the concerts had been booked, organised and advertised, we set about planning a programme - in detail - to be suitable for both children and adults. A frantic phone call from Mike Sanderson enquiring how many children there would be in the audience produced the answer ‘not very many’. So he had the extremely difficult task of devising a child-friendly, but adult programme …or was it an adult-friendly children’s programme? In the publicity it is described as ‘fast, furious and fun’ which was a tall order, but clearly one that acted as inspiration for Mike.

Originally to be a ‘themed’ concert (like ‘All the World’s a Stage’), we decided this time on the idea of an imaginary invented fairy story, based on all the legends and myths you can think of. The story itself is related from a mock-mediaeval fairy-tale lectern, by Mike Sanderson, Julia Black and Wendy Hancock, while Diane Terry, Abby Wall and Michael Overbury have the role of relating (true) anecdotes ‘spontaneously’ as asides. These all begin “Did you know that…”, such as:

‘Did you know that the Drunken Sailor is one of the oldest English sea shanties but the melody is an Irish tune. The sailors used to stamp in time to the rhythm as they were hauling on the ropes to lift the sails. This Drunken Sailor was not the last. Not so long ago a British conductor was fined £2,400 as he was sailing in the Solent. The magistrates said that he was so drunk that he was a hazard to other boats. The police accused him of having a ‘glazed expression’…that’s a very big fine for having a blank face !’

Nervously we went on to perform our ‘first night’ at Countesthorpe Village Hall, Leicestershire, but luckily for us the first two concerts had friendly and responsive audiences sitting at tables with drinks and picnics. The third, however, was to an entirely adult group sitting in old-fashioned pews in Husband’s Bosworth Parish Church, with no guarantee of any pre-concert lubrication…daunting task! But Mike, in his usual debonair manner won the audience over straight away by inviting them to pretend they were under ten, which would “enable them to enjoy the concert much more.”

The audiences were wonderful. They all seemed to have a lot of fun banging the thunder sheet, making the clip-clop sound of horses’ hooves with coconuts, singing the choruses of well-known nursery rhymes, participating in some excellent country dancing, cheering and shouting where appropriate, and producing some highly–imaginative and skilful drawings of gobbledygooks in the interval (like the one on the right). ‘Points will be awarded for those which most closely resemble our singer’ said Michael Overbury lugubriously. Moreover there seemed to be no noticeable difference in enjoyment between those actually under ten and those just pretending…

This programme is lots of fun, but the music is not all simple (and certainly not simple to play !!) and none of it is trivial. Indeed it contains some excellent Purcell, a clever arrangement of Newark Siege by John Jenkins, and some extremely flashy playing of the First Witch’s Dance from the Masque of Queens by Julia Black, and of Winter from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons by Diane Terry. Do come and enjoy it - preferably in a child-like frame of mind!

This page last updated 14 January 2009

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