March 2026 Playing Day with Alyson Lewin

On a beautiful spring day – which happened to coincide with Early Music Day, March 21st – we welcomed Alyson Lewin for our Visiting Conductor playing day. 25 players from as far afield as Cardigan Bay and Bridgend gathered in Trecastle, with instruments including our new Subgreatbass, 2 contrabasses and several great basses.
Alyson started us off gently with her arrangement of a traditional Welsh melody, ‘The Wild White Rose’. Although the score includes dynamics, Alyson explained that we individually only need to use very subtle changes as the dynamics of the piece are built into the scoring. The arrangement originally included a section with the option of singing whilst playing, which some people tried, but the jury was out on whether we liked it better with or without.
Our next piece was by the Renaissance composer Osbert Parsley. ‘Parsley’s Clock’ (or ‘Ut re mi fa sol la upon the dial’) features a simple tenor line with the melody – an ascending scale of 6 long notes, followed by descending notes back to the tonic. Alyson pictured for us a clock face with the hour hand starting at 6, rising to 12 and descending back to 6.
Lunch time gave us the opportunity of enjoying the sun, or browsing the many boxes of music which Alyson had brought.
Refreshed, we tackled some unbarred music under Alyson’s expert guidance, with a couple of simple pieces followed by Byrd’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus’. We learnt the value of reading the words alongside playing the notes, to give insight into the phrasing and hence where to breath. It made a huge difference to the feel of the pieces when we all did this.
Finally we split into 2 ‘choirs’ for Gabrieli’s ’Canzon Septimi Toni’, the most challenging piece of the day with some tricky time changes that Alyson made look so simple!
A thoroughly enjoyable day. Huge thanks to Alyson, and to those members who provided homemade biscuits, cake and bara brith!

Hard at work

Musical director Caroline, enjoying playing for once!

Music, anyone?