Special thanks to Steinway & Sons for sponsorship in the form of a Steinway
model D grand piano for our concerts - have a look at their website  - see
the links page.

The beginning of 2006 sees the start of one of the most exciting projects the BTN have ever undertaken. It is a three-year contract with for British Council to deliver major projects in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal. We begin in January with 10 days in Kazakhstan’s capital, Almaty. The project will involve creating new music and training orchestral musicians and traditional musicians in improvisation and our workshop technique, as well as making music with teachers and children from a wide variety of schools. One of the schools is a school for children with cerebral palsy. I visited the school on my recce last year, and was very impressed by the work being done by a wonderful Russian music teacher. However, he only had one triangle to work with in his music department – so BTN had a campaign during our BBC projects last summer to raise money and instruments and CDs. We will travel out with nearly 200 classical recordings, and a pile of instruments, and enough cash to provide a department full of percussion, as well as a new hi-fi. We are so excited about that! After that project culminates, I go on to Tashkent in Uzbekistan alone for some solo concerts, a recce and the beginning of training for the BTN visit that will take place in March/April. In May we start another interesting project, with the Gurzenich Orchestra in Koln. The orchestra is one of the oldest in the world (having premiered symphonies by Mahler and a host of other works), and the current chief is the innovative young conductor Markus Stenz, who has given BTN a 30’ slot in a concert in September that will mark the 20th anniversary of the Koln Philharmonic Hall – one of the most beautiful halls in Europe. Fraser Trainer has been commissioned to write a concerto for BTN and orchestra. The concerto will feature new works between its movements that we will create in workshops in May, August and September with a small group of players from the orchestra, and students from the Hochschule, and children from the Musikschule. This project is a perfect sequel to the one we did for the Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and we hope will be the first of many projects with orchestras. We are also going to record our second disc this year, and it will be entirely improvised – it will connect to a big feature in the BBC Music Magazine about improvisation, and be out at the end of the year. More details later... Finally, the other project this year is a two-week retreat to Aldeburgh to create some new music. We have been looking for this opportunity for a long time, as we are dying to get some new pieces together. We will be showing these at another gig at the Spitz, and one in Zaragoza in Spain. That’s all for now – more in summer…. Matthew Barley – cellist/director