Category: Workshops

It’s Spring again, the season above all others which is devoted to song. The birds are waking us at dawn, the bees are buzzing, and everything is bursting with new life. There’s an enormous repertoire of songs to celebrate this time of year, so why not celebrate it with us?

As always, we offer a whole day workshop for singers 9.45am – 5pm, including the services of our accompanist. A two-course lunch with wine, coffee and tea breaks with homemade cakes are also provided.

Date: Saturday April 22nd 2017
Price: £110

Contact us at stephen@varcoe.com for more information.

You are welcome to join us for our Singing Workshop on November 7 at Ansells Farm. Our theme is anything connected with water, from the smallest raindrop to the mightiest ocean via a whole landscape (waterscape?) of marshes, streams and rivers. Nor should we forget the ever-popular poetic teardrop.

£110 for the workshop, £35 to bring your own accompanist, with a deposit of £30 on booking a place. We also encourage observers if people really aren’t ready to take part as singers – this costs £55, including lunch.

Tel: 01787 269570
Email svarcoe1@googlemail.com

[Update] This workshop is now fully booked.

We invite you to join us for our first Singing Workshop of 2015. Our theme this time is Songs & Arias in Italian, that most musical of singing languages. Here’s your chance to be a Pavarotti or a Sutherland for a day (though no concessions for celebrities); or maybe you love the gentler baroque cadences of the Aria Antiche or the wonderful traditional songs of Naples and the Commedia dell’arte? However your love of the Bel Paese and its music grabs you we want to hear it!

£110 for the workshop, £35 to bring your own accompanist, and £30 deposit. We also encourage observers if people aren’t ready to take part as singers – this costs £55, including lunch.

Tel: 01787 269570
Email svarcoe1@googlemail.com

If you are thinking of attending some of Stephen’s song workshops or classes, here are some advance dates for your calendar. Further details will be posted in due course.

February 21, 2015
Ansells workshop – Italian songs and arias.

February 27 – March 1, 2015
A weekend of English song at Jackdaws with Sarah Leonard.

May 2, 2015
‘On Wings of Song’.

August 9-15, 2015
A week of classes at the Sherborne Summer School of Music.

August 16-23, 2015
A week of classes at AIMS, Eastbourne College.

In this centenary year of commemoration, regret and gratitude it would be a strange omission if we didn’t celebrate the legacy to music of those precocious talents who died in or were profoundly affected by the Great War.

Some of the finest poems in English, and some of the most moving and astonishing songs, remain as the promise of what might have been had things been different. In contrast to the exquisite songs of e.g. Butterworth, Gurney, Farrar, Denis Browne, Vaughan Williams and Holst are the hundreds of popular songs written to keep up the spirits of the folk at home.

Of course this was truly a world war, so what wartime songs from other countries can you find to balance this feast of Englishness? We invite you to choose those which sum up for you the pride, patriotism and pity of that extraordinary time, and move us afresh as we try to imagine what it must have been like.

Contact us at stephen@varcoe.com for more details of these days, or to be added to the mailing list for future workshops.

We invite you to join us for the first of our Ansells Song Workshop Days after this warm and pleasant summer.

One of the themes which has constantly inspired composers and poets through the ages is the landscape. In Britain alone we have open heaths, hills and dales, cityscapes and village greens, woodlands and farm fields, open roads and hidden paths – and then there’s the rest of the world! Close your eyes and let some armchair travel carry you to deserts and oases, mountain ranges and icy wastes, azure seas and exotic jungles…. and if all that’s not purple enough to get you thinking of songs to bring to our next workshop, your imagination needs an MOT!

Contact us at stephen@varcoe.com for more details of these days, or to be added to the mailing list for future workshops.

Song Workshop at Ansells Farm, 10th May 2014: Songs of the Stage

Another successful workshop, with all places filled.

Song Workshop at Ansells Farm, 22nd March 2014: Planning a Programme.

The workshop was full and a tremendous success.