Concert Season 2017-2018
This season with WLS is a varied programme which includes two anniversary concerts. We began with a central European programme including Strauss’s famous Four Last Songs and Mahler’s 4th Symphony. In November we commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with Bach and Mendelssohn. We continued our series of popular family Christmas concerts in December. Our wide ranging February concert brought in pieces from England, Germany, Finland and Hungary. The following concert in March featured the very dramatic “The Confession of Isobel Gowdie” – a requiem for woman burnt as a witch in Scotland in 1662 – which received its sensational premiere at the Proms in 1990. In May we commemorated our benefactor Ida Doddridge with a programme of Beethoven and Dvorak, and we conclude our London season with a concert at St James’s Piccadilly featuring two very popular works – Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. And to complete the picture, we present a fine array of soloists through the year, both from within the orchestra and outside.
Welcome to West London Sinfonia
West London Sinfonia is an amateur orchestra with ambition and passion. Our players, many of whom work in music or music education, come from all over London. Most of our players have non-music day jobs, but for all of us, making music is an important part of our lives. We perform a wide programme of music with a concentration on larger orchestral works from the 19th (especially late 19th) and early 20th centuries. We regularly perform with world class soloists, and we are fortunate to have Philip Hesketh as our musical director and Iwona Boesche as our leader.
Join West London Sinfonia
If you’re looking to join a friendly and ambitious orchestra, we are always on the look-out for string players (especially in the violin and viola sections). We presently have a vacancy for bass trombone. If you’d like to enquire just complete the form on our contact page, and Lydia our membership secretary will contact you immediately.
Come to a performance
To enjoy a great evening of high quality classical music, please look through our season programme. You can buy tickets for any of our concerts online. Join our mailing list if you would like to receive information about future concerts.
We look forward to welcoming you soon.
Our Next Concert
7 July 2018 at St James’ Church, Piccaddilly, W1J 9LL
Tickets available online here.
Recent Reviews
How is it that non-professional orchestras sound so good? In the spacious St Michael’s Church the West London Sinfonia and Philip Hesketh (its director for two-and-a-half decades) provided an evening of music performed with great skill and remarkable accuracy, the players responding fully to the conductor’s expressive phrasing. The feature was John Carmichael's Trumpet Concerto (1972). Barry Yardley is clearly very familiar with the work and he encompassed impressively its numerous facets. The final Act of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake was performed with panache. Detail was admirable and, as throughout the concert, harpist Sophy Cartledge was superb. Special mention must also be made of the percussion section which had demanding passages in all three works and was precise, exciting and ideally forceful. Hesketh and his musicians were clearly at one and he built a tremendous climax in the Tchaikovsky, the point at which the famous theme which permeates the score blazes out in a major key is one of the great moments and it was all the more remarkable on this occasion as the huge volume of sound, ideally balanced, reached its peak, enhanced by the resonant acoustic. Amid all this power and brilliance, inner detail remained clear. London has a wealth of amateur orchestras and the West London Sinfonia is a very fine example.
