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The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra


Birmingham’s Symphony Hall is an impressive venue. What better place, therefore, to see and hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) perform a special family concert: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

When Catherine Arlidge walked onto the stage to present the show, I just knew that we were going to enjoy it. I have been to family concerts hosted by her before and she has a relaxed, fun style that puts everyone at ease. The concert was split into bite sized chunks with children waiting for the pause button visual at the end of musical pieces to shout out “PAUSE" before finding out more about the orchestra and enjoying games with Catherine. The show lasted about an hour and passed quickly- even for my eight month old who was being bounced on my lap.

Catherine explained that the orchestra was colour coded for the performance. For instance, all the strings were wearing red. This visual image made it very straightforward for the children in the audience to understand how the orchestra was made up. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra uses an arrangement by Benjamin Britten to show off each of the sections. We heard each section of the orchestra play so that we could really hear the different sounds of the instruments.



The games need a special mention. Adults were pitched against children in games of hangman where you had to guess musical instrument names. What the children found particularly funny was that the adults’ clues were too hard and they kept losing. We learned about obscure musical instruments like the loophonium and Picasso guitar. This provoked plenty of laughter from the children.

Our favourite part of the show was undoubtedly hearing the orchestra perform. Children all around us were enjoying the music. Some were sitting silently, absorbed and watching but others were dancing along or pointing things out. My wriggly baby was ‘shouting’ along at times. No one minded- most people there were parents, grandparent, aunts or uncles. The children were enjoying the show and part of it. CBSO family concerts don’t just pretend to be relaxed, they actually are.

My family definitely want to go along to another CBSO family concert. As we drove home, we talked about our favourite instruments in the orchestra and the funny parts of the show that we had enjoyed. We had heard pieces by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms among others. We had learned what the conductor does, which is the biggest section in the orchestra and found out which instruments played the music as Harry Potter’s Nimbus 2000 zipped around in the film. Most importantly though, we’d enjoyed the music and had lots of fun along the way.

The next CBSO family concert is in Birmingham’s Town Hall on Sunday 2nd February at 2.30pm. It’s called ‘We Got Rhythm’ and it all about the orchestra’s percussion instruments. It is bound to be noisy and fun plus this concert also offers a chance to get hands on. 

https://cbso.co.uk/event/we-got-rhythm.  Tickets are £12 each or £38 for 4.


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