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Winchmore String Orchestra have issued their autumn newsletter, featuring news of their new conductor and a typically varied programme for their next concert, at which he will be both conducting and playing violin.

Prize-winning maestro joins WSO

With a new season which, Covid permitting, will see the WSO more or less back to business as usual, we have a new conductor, Gonzalo Acosta. He takes over from Michael Coleby, who moved on in the summer after directing us with great skill and good humour for four years.

Born in Uruguay, Gonzalo came to Britain as a child and studied violin at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included the distinguished professor, Zakhar Bron, among whose former students have been many world-class players. At the age of 21 he became principal Second Violin of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 1989 he joined the orchestra of English National Opera as co-leader, a post he held for 30 years. He has also led many orchestras in Britain, Belgium, Spain, Norway and Australia. As a recitalist and chamber musician, Gonzalo has made recordings with the Dussek Piano Trio.

For the last 13 years Gonzalo has taught orchestral playing at the Junior RCM, to which he has since added a similar role at the Junior Guildhall School. He also coaches youth orchestras and conservatoire string ensembles and he is now Head of Strings at Wycombe Abbey School.

In recent years he has also been increasingly busy as a conductor. Winner in 2016 of the first prize in the London Conducting Masterclass, he regularly conducts the Junior RCM Sinfonia and Symphony Orchestras, the Kent Youth Orchestra, the London Repertoire Orchestra, the Enfield Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Abbots Langley Orchestra, and he has been Assistant Conductor of the English Schools Orchestra. He is Music Director of Grim’s Dyke Opera, which stages a different Gilbert and Sullivan opera each month at Gilbert’s house, now an hotel, in Harrow Weald.

In his first concert with us Gonzalo appears in two roles – conductor and soloist – which come together in the Violin Concerto in A minor by J S BACH, one of only two he is known to have written for the instrument. Gonzalo will follow the 18th-century practice of conducting the orchestra while playing the exacting solo part.

The rest of the concert largely consists of works by British composers. With a respectful nod to VAUGHAN WILLIAMS in his 150th birthday year, it will open with Rhosymedre, one of three preludes based on Welsh hymn-tunes that he originally wrote for organ. It is sometimes known by the English title “Lovely”. Another British composer, Gerald FINZI, who owed much to Vaughan Williams both personally and musically, is represented by his pastoral, elegiac Romance in E flat.

Unconventional Old Etonian Philip Heseltine, better known by his provocative pen-name Peter Warlock, figures with one of the best-known works of his short life, Bethlehem Down, described as “a carol for strings”. And then we have John RUTTER, the living patron saint of choral music, with one of his few instrumental works, the delightful Suite for Strings, a set of four pieces based on traditional English songs.

From further afield the programme will include Vistas al Mar (sea views) by the 20th-century Catalan composer, Eduardo TOLDRÁ, which he called “poetic evocations”. Plus a perhaps unexpected offering by Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH, the towering Russian composer of the last century whose work is emblematic of the turbulence of his time: a gentle, beguiling waltz from his second Jazz Suite.

Finally, with Christmas only a fortnight later, the programme finds room for a Christmas Concerto – no, not the famous one by Corelli but by his contemporary and near-namesake Giuseppe TORELLI. It is marked “in the form of a pastoral, for the most holy Nativity”.

The customary raffle during the interval will be in support of Southgate Methodist Church.