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Street Parish Church Friday 26 November 7.30 p.m.
John Smart in Concert
Programme
Handel: Sonata in D
Bach: Partita No. 2 in D minor
Schubert: Sonatina in D
Bartok: Six Roumanian Folk Dances
INTERVAL
Cesar Franck: Sonata in A - last movement
Fritz Kreisler: Caprice Viennois
Paganini: Cantabile
Massenet: Meditation from Thais
Debussy: La Fille au Cheveux de Lin
Gershwin: Three songs arranged for violin
W. Kroll: Banjo and Fiddle.
JOHN SMART-Violin
John was born and brought up in Street and started the violin at the age of 6. For the first 5 years of his learning he was taught by Peggy Milne - a then well known local peripatetic violin and viola teacher, who helped him gain a place on the Specialist Music Course at Wells Cathedral School where he studied for 6 years with Patricia Knight. Whilst at Wells John gave many solo and chamber music concerts, and in his final year, led the school Chamber Orchestra, including the 1986 World Tour with the Cathedral Choir and a celebratory concert with Yehudi Menuhin and Yfrah Neaman. He also performed Dvorak's Romance for solo violin and orchestra with the school Symphony Orchestra. John then went on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where he studied with John Glickman and DeUef Hahn, and soon after leaving, gained a place in the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway.
John now lives in London and works mainly with small chamber orchestras and ensembles, including the Apollo Chamber Orchestra, the London Concertante and the European Union Chamber Orchestra with whom he has toured South East Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. John plays on a violin made in 1982 by Malcolm Combes of Denmead, Portsmouth.
DAVID PARSONS - Piano
Born in Warsaw to an Irish mother and an English father, David escaped Hitler's threatened invasion in 1939, fleeing to Dublin. There they unsuccessfully tried to teach him Irish. In 1948 he was thrilled to see red buses, and eels in the Old Kent Road, when his parents moved to London.
He went to school in Somerset, occasionally playing rugby with the second XV (it was a small school with few boys to select from), before being posted by the RAF to exotic locations like Birmingham and London and actually going up in an aeroplane - twice.
After five enjoyable years as an idle college student he abandoned neckties in favour of a clerical collar, and went to live near Liverpool where the Beatles were exciting the young, and the old were feeling threatened. He inadvertently packed the parish church when a planned youth service with guitars and drums aroused a storm of controversy and led to an appearance on local TV, complete with guitar and backing group of youth club members.
For a quieter life he moved to a council house in Suffolk and was left in charge of a building site which became a new church, pioneering the use of modern English services. He spent some time as a vicar, also in Suffolk, before becoming a school chaplain and teacher in Somerset, where, apart from a few years in foreign parts (Bristol), he has lived ever since.
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Thursday 20th of November 2008
