9th December 2025 Marryat Hall
Supported by Rotary Club of Broughty Ferry
and Leisure & Culture Dundee
Participants were a quartet of senior students from Dundee schools together with their teachers. The aim of the workshop was to develop ensemble playing through connection between players.
"There were smiles on everybody's faces"
The quartet worked together on an arrangment from Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera as well as individually on solo pieces by Saint Saens and Finzi.
"My best birthday ever!"
Work on the music was interspersed with highly inventive exercises on movement, expression and rhythm,
I"t did not feel like two hours"
Question If you stood up and played your clarinet today would you feel different than you did before you started yesterday? Answer: Yeah definitely. I guess you don’t need a conductor cos like the person who is leading on can do it themselves and like set the tempo. We all feel a little bit different today than we did yesterday. Participant 1
“My favourite part was imagining all the different maneouvres like imagining I’m walking through clay and floating as well as flying and imagining how I could use those maneouvres to play my clarinet more expressively with tone.” Participant 2
“Now I’ll focus more on like looking around more, listening to other peoples’ parts more. She went into depth more. She found a way to make it come to life. It did change the performance, it flowed better.” Participant 3
“I learned that the clarinet can and is expressive like if something is like smooth and light you can like slowly play and move the instrument at the same time and if it’s big and exciting you can also move around.” Participant 4
You can watch a video of a performance of the ensemble piece from Kurt Weil's Threepenny Opera by clicking on this link:
You can watch videos of solo performances of pieces by Finzi and Saint-Saëns by clicking on these links:
