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News Archive – 2015

News Summary

This is a summary of older news items for this web site, with links to more details further down the page or elsewhere on the site.  Note that some old links on this page may no longer work, or may no longer be active. 

28th November 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for December 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HSO concert with Jane Streeton at Oaklands School, Waterlooville, on Saturday 5th December. 
12th October 2015 Those lucky enough to have been at the Ferneham Hall on Sunday night were treated to a fine performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.  … See our Reviews page for a link to Peter Rhodes’ review of the HCO concert in the Portsmouth News. 
3rd October 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for October 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HCO concert with Craig Ogden at Ferneham Hall, Fareham, on Sunday 11th October. 
19th August 2015 Tickets for the HCO concert with Craig Ogden at Ferneham Hall on Sunday 11th October are now available from the Ferneham Hall booking office.  Click the Tickets button in the concert details for more information. 

Availability of tickets for individual Ferneham Hall concerts has previously been deferred until mid-September to give season ticket holders more time to choose their seats, but given the potential level of interest in the October concert it has been decided to shorten this process to allow Ferneham Hall to start selling tickets earlier. 

21st July 2015 We are very pleased to announce that the Bob Harding Bursary for Young Conductors for the season 2015-16 has been awarded to Joseph Beckhelling, from the University of Southampton, where Joe has been studying conducting with Robin Browning (well known to us as musical director of Havant Chamber Orchestra).

Each year, we like to audition up to a maximum of four candidates, which is as many as we can reasonably fit into an evening’s rehearsal time, although in practice we have normally had three candidates, and we sometimes have one or two candidates withdraw because of subsequent commitments elsewhere, such as professional appointments.  As we already found last year, there are now too few eligible courses at the London music colleges to provide enough candidates, so we temporarily extended the original bursary scheme to invite nominations of students from other selected conducting courses, especially in the local region, in this case at the University of Southampton.  We have been very impressed with the standard of the additional candidates and we are planning to continue the extended scheme in future, although the exact details have yet to be decided. 

In the past, we have always deferred the announcement of the award winner until the society AGM in September, so that players and other society members attending the AGM are the first to know.  In a few cases, the student initially selected for the award has also needed time to confirm whether they are actually available, for example if they are awaiting news of a potentially conflicting professional appointment.  However, in these days of instant internet communication, we can inform most of our players and other society members by email, and Joe has already confirmed his availability, so we decided to announce immediately. 

Havant Symphony Orchestra very much enjoyed Joe’s audition rehearsal, and are eagerly looking forward to working with Joe in the coming season.  Further information will be posted on the website soon.

13th July 2015 The playful Spanish rhythms in Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon Overture were brilliantly accentuated and set the mood for what promised to be a wholly rewarding concert…  See our Reviews page for a link to Alex Creamer’s review of the HSO Oaklands concert in the Portsmouth News. 
3rd July 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for July 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HSO concert at Oaklands School, Waterlooville, on Saturday 11th July. 
28th June 2015 We’ve moved!  This website has moved to www.havantorchestras.org.uk.  Please ensure any bookmarks or links to this site are updated to use the new name. 

Our website was previously hosted by Hampshire County Council as www.havantorchestras.hampshire.org.uk under their free hosting scheme for eligible organisations, but they have recently given advance warning that this service will be terminated in July next year. 

Unfortunately, we could not keep the original name, because all names ending in hampshire.org.uk belong to HCC and are routed to their systems.  We have therefore registered our new name without the hampshire part and moved our website to another hosting service, 34SP.com, who very generously also provide a free hosting service for organisations which are registered charities, with fewer limitations and much better facilities than the old HCC service. 

The old website has been modified to redirect all requests to the new website, so the old name should continue to work at least until HCC terminate their service in a year’s time.  We have also used the Google webmaster tools to notify Google that our site has moved, and we hope this will enable Google to migrate over to using our new site soon. 

The "webmaster" and "updates" email addresses associated with the old website are also being phased out.  The new email addresses are webmaster.havantorchestras@gmail.com and updates.havantorchestras@gmail.com

The website move appears to have gone smoothly, but if you spot any glitches or have any questions relating to it, please inform the webmaster, webmaster.havantorchestras@gmail.com.

8th May 2015 2015-16 season announced!  Full details of the Havant Orchestras concert programme for the 2015/16 season are now available on this website, together with information about booking season tickets.  As there are still more concerts in the current season, the main Concerts and Tickets navigation buttons at the top of page will still take you to the current season’s details for now, but you can then select the button on the right for next season's details. 
8th May 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for May 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HCO concert at Ferneham Hall, Fareham, on Saturday 16th May. 
8th May 2015 We have expanded the scope of our Events page to include concerts by several other amateur orchestras in the area, and also modified the layout to make it work better on mobile devices.  The summary on the home page will continue to focus on events most relevant to the Havant Orchestras, but the full list includes many other events. 
30th March 2015 Only one word for it really: wow!  See our Reviews page for a link to Mike Allen’s review of the HSO Oaklands concert in the Portsmouth News. 
26th March 2015 Following last December's concert at Oaklands School, we had several comments from audience members about having difficulty finding their way from car parking areas to the main hall, and even having difficulty working out their way around the building.  We are therefore producing various signs and labels to help people find their way around the site and the building, and we have added a simplified map of the car parks and paths to the Oaklands directions page on this website. 
26th March 2015 To improve the usability of this web site on mobile devices, the block of navigation buttons at the top of each page can now scroll sideways, and occupies the full screen width rather than leaving empty margins when the screen width is limited.  This allows the main text to occupy the full width of the window even when the buttons do not fit.  The buttons still shrink automatically on narrower screens, but this has now been limited so the buttons should remain readable and usable even on narrow screens.

To make it easier to read web pages on wide screens, new pages on this web site which only use a single column of text may now optionally limit the width of the main text to a reasonable page width (currently set to 840 pixels).  The new March newsletter uses this option, and existing pages may be changed in future to use the same option. 

Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions relating to these changes. 

22nd March 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for March 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HSO concert at Oaklands School, Waterlooville, on Saturday 28th March. 
14th February 2015 As mentioned in the recent Newsletter, our original soloist for our March concert at Oaklands, Alexander Sitkovetsky, has won an award which means he needs to be elsewhere on our concert date.  We are pleased to announce that Sasha has kindly arranged for international soloist Boris Brovtsyn to take his place. 
31st January 2015 The Havant Orchestras Newsletter for February 2015 is now available, including additional information about the HCO concert at Ferneham Hall, Fareham, on Saturday 7th February. 

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