Recorder Roadshow

Piers Adams' Recorder Roadshow is the culmination of 5 years of gala interactive recorder events for young people throughout the UK. This major initiative enables schoolchildren to take part in concert with Piers Adams, bringing awareness of the recorder's amazing possibilities to a wide public. Since the first Recorder Roadshow in Walsall in 1995 many top festival and concert promoters have taken advantage of this unique event to bring community involvement and a large new audience to their classical series, whilst schools and education authorities have used the scheme to mount concerts of their own.

Piers Adams has taken his Recorder Roadshow three times to the hallowed space of London's Wigmore Hall, where in Autumn 2001 the world premiere of David Pugsley's Recorder Rave took place.   This unforgettable work, which has now become a mainstay of Recorder Roadshow events, take Piers Adams and his accompanist Howard Beach through an extraordinary range of styles from rap to funk to minimalism to avant-garde to boogie-woogie - all assisted by a chorus of raving young recorder-players!

A typical Recorder Roadshow concert features music from 8 centuries and 3 continents, played on around 20 recorders of all shapes and sizes, including:

A Mediaeval Mix of foot-stomping dances and haunting laments

Renaissance Rock from England and Holland

Baroque-Busters by Bach, Handel and Vivaldi

A Spanish Fiesta of flamenco music by Granados and Ibert

Gypsy Gyrations by Sarasate and Dinicu

A Modern Menagerie including a Deadly Dancing Spider, Tropical Birds and a Forest of Darkness (complete with narrator and massed recorders)

Community involvement is a key feature of the Recorder Roadshow, through pre-concert workshops for players of all levels, in which interactive items are prepared.   The final result is an event in a category of its own - part entertainment, part inspiration, part education - all informally performed and compered by one of the leading recorder players of our time.

Over 7000 children have so far taken part, and the Recorder Roadshow has been featured in the Guinness Book of Records, on BBC TV's Newsround and many regional news programmes, twice breaking the World Record for the largest recorder ensemble.

Photo courtesy of  the Oxford Times