About Us
​Founded by Wiktor Wysocki officially on the 16th of January 2023, it had its start in September as a smaller ensemble of eight people, made up of a guitar, bass trombone and winds. It has now grown to over 48 members, with plans for further growth in the near future. Size of the orchestra varies on the repertoire.
The RRO is a recently formed orchestra, consisting of RBC students and graduates, and run entirely by RBC students, with support from staff and tutors. We are grateful to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire for providing us with their continued support and encouragement with our upcoming 2nd Season.
Its focus is on romantic repertoire, alongside new and contemporary tonal compositions and is intended to be, in part, a platform for composers to express their emotions in a colorfully tonal and refreshing way. Last season we had 3 pieces by contemporary composers including Andrew Toovey's Red Bird (orch. V.Motta), Howard Skempton's Lento, and Mason Ma's Marine: the Womb of All Life. We continue this in our second season, inviting 4 composers from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire to write for the orchestra including Nicholas Paul, Jamie-Lou, Ella-Rose Rayner, James Sharif and a throwback to Wiktor Wysocki's Concerto for Two Guitars.
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The RRO was founded with a purpose in mind: to revive romantic music in the wider classical genre, in a relevant and modern style hence, Romantic-Revival. It isn't about eliminating the experimental, atonal or similar works, but rather about giving new, romantic music a voice alongside that. Accessible music for all, brought to you by the young musicians of tomorrow. The orchestra is conducted by Leo Jaffrey, with past guest conductors including Tommasso Nista and Howard Skempton.
About the Romantic-Revival Movement
“The Romantic revival in serious music arose in the 1960s after decades of relatively conservative and traditional offerings by the world’s concert presenting organizations and record companies. After World War II there was an over-emphasis on the canon of standard “great masterpieces”, co-existing with disdain for any music that was perceived as not profound in intent. The gray and uninteresting scope of music at the time was complemented by attempts to have contemporary twelve-tone music accepted into the mainstream. Similarly, there was a widespread and profound change in the way music was taught, with the traditional conservatory bar-by-bar reading of the text (score) replacing the earlier centuries’ interest in spontaneity, imagination and personality in performance.
This revitalization of the musical scene was brought about by a number of musicians who had been trained in the old style, and a smaller number of musicologists and music company executives who were interested in viable compositions that had been
excluded from the canon, as well as more flexible and expressive ways of performing. The subject was one of the favorites of Harold C. Schonberg, then music critic of the New York Times. Schonberg credited Frank Cooper and his Festival of Neglected Romantic Music with jump starting the revival. In the 1970s, through reviews in Records & Recording, Ates Orga championed the movement in Britain, leading later to his 1994 Virtuoso Romantics series with Marc-André Hamelin at the Wigmore Hall. Now in the beginning of the 21st century, because of those efforts, the repertoires of orchestras, string quartets, opera houses, ballet troupes and solo instrumentalists are far more likely to contain a wide variety of music from all periods, including 19th century works by composers other than Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, that had been previously excluded before the revival.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_Revival
The predominant difference between this movement and the goal of the RRO is to champion new romantic music alongside the well-known and obscure works of previous generations of composers. The RRO is intended to be a platform for composers to express their emotions in a colorfully tonal and refreshing way, in an overly grey and monotonous world. It isn't about eliminating the experimental, atonal or similar works, but rather about giving new, romantic music a voice alongside that. Accessible music for all, enjoyable for those new and familiar to classical music.
Meet the Team
Read about the people who make our concerts happen.
Click on their image to learn more!