A decade ago violinist Lucy Melvin launched a five-day non-residential holiday music course for young string players in south London, based at All Saints Church, West Dulwich. Her intention was to recreate the chamber music courses led by Emanuel Hurwitz that fired her own ambition and enhanced her enjoyment of playing the violin at an early age. A junior group would be coached in the morning and seniors in the afternoon; they would meet for an introductory concert by an inspirational professional ensemble, and for their own final performance for family and friends.
‘Playing in ensembles helps develop a side to music-making that pupils might not find in having lessons on their own,’ Melvin told me at the time. ‘When we play with other people, we learn more about essential skills such as rhythm, harmony and sight-reading, which are so important to grasp. It is also a very sociable way to play music – it is great to realise how much fun can be had from playing an instrument.’
Chamber Players is now firmly established, though the venue is now Sydenham High School in Crystal Palace, which has even more space for different activities to run simultaneously. The tutors are highly respected chamber musicians and teachers; the students are placed in ensembles with other players of similar abilities and experience, so that they can all get the most out of the course. There are orchestral sessions throughout the week, and senior pupils are given the opportunity to rehearse a concerto movement.
‘We now have seven tutors and we've added theory coaching for anyone working towards the Grade 5 exam – that's open to anyone, not just the instrumental course participants, because we realised it's such a barrier for many youngsters who want to go on to the higher instrumental grades,’ says Melvin. ‘Our tutor, Althea Wray, is brilliant and they all seem to enjoy it.’
Scholarships enable Melvin to offer places to students from a wide range of backgrounds, and she is pleased that the same children return year after year, progressing from junior ensembles to playing solos in Bach concertos or leading senior quartets.
A new commission
An important aspect of Chamber Players courses is that all the ensembles, even the least advanced, play ‘real’ classical repertoire, not arrangements of pop music. So when she decided to commission a new string quartet to celebrate 10 years of Chamber Players courses, Melvin turned to a composer who she knew would be able to write something in the same spirit: fellow South Londoner Thomas Hewitt-Jones. His family has been associated with music-making at All Saints Church where the Chamber Players courses started for many years, so he fitted the bill on a personal as well as a professional level.
‘I wanted to get back to that pure classical string quartet sound that Hartmut Ometzburger, one of our violin tutors, and I grew up with on Manny Hurwitz's courses,’ Melvin explains. ‘Over time the string quartet has become bigger and bigger, with longer and more complex movements – I asked Thomas to take it back to the simple, elegant style of Haydn and Mozart.
‘The second part of my brief was to consider the legacy of the piece for Chamber Players courses – it needed to have short movements, under five minutes long, that could be taken out of context and used on their own as showcase pieces for our ensembles, not 11-minute movements like the Mendelssohn Octet. But it also had to work as a whole, as a rewarding recital piece for professional performers or for our advanced students.’
It sounds like a lot to ask, but Hewitt-Jones enjoys working to a very specific brief and, having joined Melvin's team as a cello tutor on last summer's course, understood what was required. He delivered the last movement of the quartet in time to be performed by the tutors as a surprise item in the end-of-course concert. ‘It was a joyful, ebullient celebratory piece of classical music in a contemporary style – exactly what I had hoped for,’ Melvin says.
The remaining movements were completed for two fundraising concerts by the Chamber Players Ensemble (Ometzburger, Melvin, violist Dorothea Vogel and cellist Graham Walker) in London and Warwickshire in February.
Hewitt Jones dealt with the requirement for the quartet to lend itself to future student performances by strategies such as including ossia sections where professional or more advanced student players can add harmonics up and down the strings. ‘The music won't sound that different if those options are left out,’ he says. ‘Each movement showcases a different instrument, and I also tried to make sure that the accompaniments and counter-melodies had plenty of interest, so that when they are performed as separate pieces they will be enjoyable for all members of a young ensemble to play.’
Melvin says she is very pleased with the versatility of what is now called Divertimento for String Quartet, and proud to have added to the catalogue of educational pieces for string ensembles as well as commissioning a new work that sits well in a professional recital programme. ‘The commission was very much a collaboration, and Thomas and I talked a lot about it,’ she says, ‘but his own personality and sense of humour shines through in the music.’
Plans for this summer's Chamber Players courses are still evolving. While some of Melvin's early cohorts have gone on to study music at university and one to conservatoire, she says this isn't her primary aim. ‘We do provide work experience, with some students coming back to help on the courses – one of them now takes our official photographs, and it's great if our courses can help give them the all-round confidence to go into the wider world. But really I just want them to enjoy playing this wonderful music together.’
Find out more at www.chamberplayers.co.uk
