Acclaimed Wrexham orchestra to mark 55 years with special concert

An acclaimed orchestra is celebrating its 55th anniversary with a special concert that will feature music from around the British Isles.

The Wrexham Symphony Orchestra will take to the stage at the William Aston Hall this weekend (Saturday 20 July) with a special concert to celebrate its decades of musical experience.

Originally founded in 1969 as “The Clywedog Ensemble” by the late Bryn Williams, a senior lecturer of Music at Cartrefle Teacher Training College in Wrexham, Wrexham Symphony Orchestra started out life as a small number of local string players who got together to stage a concert at The Memorial Hall in Wrexham.

Conducted by Bryn Williams with local peripatetic violin teacher Keith Dawber as leader, the concert took place on 30 October 1969.

After a resounding success a decision was made to expand the group to include woodwind and brass players and The Wrexham and District Orchestral Society was born, with its performing arm more commonly known as the “Wrexham Orchestra”.

In 1992 the orchestra changed its name to “Wrexham Symphony Orchestra” (WSO).

Over the last 55 years, the WSO has grown to its present day membership numbering over sixty players and regularly attracts professional guest conductors and soloists.

The increase in membership has allowed the orchestra to undertake increasingly ambitious programmes of music.

Since 1997, the orchestra has been resident at the prestigious William Aston Hall in Wrexham.

As part of celebrations to mark its 55th Anniversary, the orchestra will return to the stage at the William Aston with “Music From Home”.

Conducted by acclaimed Conductor Katherine Stonham, the concert will take the audience on a musical journey around the British Isles with a programme including Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides Overture” composed in 1830 and inspired by the composers visit to Fingal’s Cave on the Island of Staffa.

“Penillion” by Welsh composer Grace Williams, Dame Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers’ Overture” an opera considered by some critics to be “the most important English Opera to be composed during the period between Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten”, Morfydd Llwyn Owen’s “Morfa Rhuddlan”, “Irish Tune from County Derry” by Percy Grainger, an adaptation of Londonderry Air, the tune most famously known as “Danny Boy”, Sir Malcom Arnold’s “Scottish Dances” and Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches No 2, and No 4 which has been featured at numerous state occasions including most recently, the Coronation of King Charles III.

Originally from Trowbridge, Wiltshire, the orchestra’s guest conductor Katherine Stonham is a graduate of a joint course run by the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Manchester, where she studied violin with Julia Hanson and conducting with Robert Guy.

She graduated from the University of Manchester with a first-class honours degree in July 2020 and was awarded the GRNCM diploma in July 2021.

Since September 2023 she has been the conducting tutor for South West Music School and South West Youth Orchestra and is the founder and principal conductor of the Manchester Philharmonic Orchestra, a dynamic new amateur orchestra based in south Manchester.

Speaking about the special celebratory concert, Matthew Ellis, the Chairman of Wrexham Symphony Orchestra said: “We are delighted to be back at the William Aston Hall for this special concert to mark our 55th anniversary with a celebration of the music of the British Isles under the baton of our guest conductor Katherine Stonham.

“It promises to be one the highlights of our 2023/24 season of concerts.”

Tickets for ‘Music from Home’ at the William Aston Hall can be purchased here. The concert will take place at 7:30pm on Saturday 20 July.