Big Band tickets £22 / £17 adults Children (under 16) half price
There will be a section of seats reserved at the very front of the nave for Festival Friends at this concert.  Festival Friend privileges include early booking and the best seats in the house!  Do consider becoming a Friend – find out more about it here.

Shall We Dance? : From Strauss to Stage & Screen

The BBC Elstree Concert Band are excited to be back in Dorchester and this time will be whisking you onto the dance floor. From the waltz to the tango, as well as a commemoration of 200yrs of Johann Strauss, music for dance takes many forms and styles. They will showcase well-known dances from the musicals and also a tribute to American ragtime. The BBC Elstree Concert Band, celebrating its 40th Anniversary, has established a reputation for entertaining the Dorchester Festival audience with diverse and varied programmes from the wind band repertory. This year, they will be joined again by Oxford Collutorium who will be making their own vocal tribute to the world of dance.

The BBC Elstree Concert Band was founded by flautist Ian Marshall and gave its first public concert at the BBC’s Elstree Studios in July 1986.  The audience was a modest one but included, crucially, the Mayor of Elstree and Borehamwood and the Town Council’s Entertainments Officer.  Their support over subsequent years has been vital to the band’s development.  Indeed, Elstree and Borehamwood remains very much the band’s spiritual home, where it regularly gives concerts.
Over the thirty plus years of the band’s existence, it has played at a wide range of venues in and around London, including the Elstree and Maida Vale Studios, St James’s Church Piccadilly, The Proms at St Jude’s in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Millfield Theatre, Allum Hall, Dorchester and Westminster Abbeys.  The ensemble has also given concerts further afield in Belgium, Germany and France.
The band’s performances have been broadcast nationally as well as globally through the BBC World Service.  The band provided the music for a major BBC 1 documentary and has made several recordings, the most recent of which was for a Radio 3 programme on the music of Charles Ives, as part of the “Discovering Music” series.  The group has also given concerts in aid of The Voice of the Listener Trust, the North London Hospice, St Luke’s Hospice and several other charitable organisations.

Oxford Collutorium was founded in 1996 by a group of doctors from the John Radcliffe Hospital, aiming to channel their extensive musical experience and enthusiasm into creating innovative and memorable concerts which could at the same time raise significant amounts of money for local medical charities. Under Will Orr’s direction since then, they have performed a wide range of works from acapella renaissance motets through to premieres of new works with full orchestra.

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