A high bar
The Imperial Sinfonietta has been hitting all the right notes for 25 years – on and off stage. So just what does it take to be part of this select group of musicians?
As the conductor’s steely gaze scans across the orchestra, each member shifts nervously in their seat. Despite the fact that it’s been many years since they played together, the old feelings of anxious exhilaration flood through them. On clarinet, Chris Woodroofe (MEng Chemical Engineering 2000), holds his breath. “Even though I graduated years ago and I’m now the managing director of Manchester Airport, I felt just like a nervous student again,” says Woodroofe. “Dan has that way of hearing everything – he can still look at me and I think ‘Oh God!’”
‘Dan’ is distinguished New York City Ballet (among others) conductor Daniel Capps (Physics and Music 1999), the founder of Imperial College Sinfonietta who is returning for a one-off reunion concert. But back in 1996, Capps was in his second year at Imperial, studying the music part of his degree at the Royal College of Music. “Imperial’s part-time musician-in-residence, Richard Dickins, was conducting Imperial’s Symphony Orchestra (SO), and said there were too many students so I should start another orchestra,” remembers Capps. “Though he did point out that it had been tried twice – and had failed twice.”
Only slightly daunted, Capps decided to give it a go. “I had been playing flute in orchestras my whole life, so I had an idea about what worked and what didn’t. I just wanted it to be functional and satisfying. It was a lot of fun and quickly became popular – we had strings out the door. At the start, I put out all the chairs and did all the posters.” Woodroofe remembers how impressed he was at the very first rehearsal. “Our first rehearsal didn’t feel like a first. Dan was just an undergrad like me, but it felt like he’d been conducting for years.”
Not that it was all plain sailing. “We had booked our first concert during the lunch hour,” says Capps, “which meant we couldn’t rehearse before. We had a very small window to tune up before the audience came in, and everyone was there apart from the bass trombone player. There’s only one bass trombone, and there were no mobiles back then, so I was quite anxious. He rocked up with 30 seconds to spare and said, ‘Sorry, I was playing pool and the balls just weren’t going in.’ I could have killed him!”
There’s no room for superiority or oneupmanship, there’s no pretence
By its second year of existence, Sinfonietta had a budget of £100 a year. “We were printing posters and paying for music – our costs were gradually increasing,” says Capps. “We moved to termly, evening concerts we could charge for, and it was becoming clear that, rather than being a side gig of the SO, we needed to form our own society, and ask for some of the university grant. It was quite awkward, but I realised that if it was to have a future, Sinfonietta needed to become its own thing.”
“I remember going to Dan’s house to figure out how to organise ourselves,” says Woodroofe, Sinfonietta’s first ever chair. “We basically stole SO’s constitution and cribbed it. It was a new world for us, with a treasurer and a chair. We had to figure out how the things that Dan made happen magically actually got done, so we could do them instead of Dan, so he could be free to conduct.”
“At our second ever committee meeting I said I thought we should go on tour, and they all just laughed at me!” says Capps. “But I had gone on tours as a child and made so many friends and had so many adventures, and I wanted the same here.”
The following year’s trip to Paris would be the start of a yearly Sinfonietta tour, pandemic years excepted, all with their own share of adventures. “We went to Vienna and Bratislava one year,” remembers Capps. “We were going to play Bruckner’s No 7 inside the Karlskirche, where his funeral took place. We were rehearsing, all set to go, and then at 11pm the night before, the chair got a call from an American lady who was bringing a youth choir on tour, and had seen our concert advertised at the same time and place as theirs was scheduled. They were going to do Mozart’s Requiem, accompanied by an organ. I said: ‘Look, we’ll give you our orchestra for the Requiem, and we’ll do the Bruckner in the second half.’ We didn’t have parts for Mozart, but we managed to borrow them off the Vienna Philharmonic, and we learnt it in an afternoon. It was a great success! The choir was thrilled.
“Another time, we sent a van of instruments off to Stockholm, while we flew. But there was an accident on the M13 and the van missed the ferry, and there wasn’t another for three days. Our secretary, who was my housemate, spent six or seven hours trying to reroute the van overland with a series of tiny ferries – it was before they built the bridge. The van just made it, but from then on, we flew with our instruments. We have to book the cellos their own seat!”
Sinfonietta members rehearse every Monday night for two and a half hours and hold three concerts a year. “Everyone is in Sinfo because they just love to play,” says current Chair Bryony Lanigan (PhD Physics 2026). “There’s no room for superiority or oneupmanship, there’s no pretence. People are here because they want to have fun and play music. They tend to start in their first year and stay for their whole time at Imperial. Students here are generally high-achieving, many have played music to a high level since they were young. But when we interviewed recently for what’s only our third ever conductor, we were looking not only for someone competent, but someone cheery, capable of lifting everyone up.”
“It’s a group who are not professional, not Royal College, but really talented players who put the effort in and hold up their end of the bargain,” says Woodroofe. “And it sounds wonderful. It’s such a privilege to play an instrument, and incredibly valuable. Sinfonietta let me in when I was wasn’t sure I was good enough, and without it I’m not sure I’d still be playing. My proudest moment was coming back in June to play the reunion concert. I felt like I’d never been away.”
Emily Strachan (Life Sciences 2019; PhD Clinical Sciences 2023) was Chair from 2020 to 2021, and says some of her favourite concerts have been supporting a soloist in a violin or piano concerto. “That feeling of the orchestra coming together in the concert, being part of a much bigger sound than you could ever make by yourself. I enjoy rehearsals as much, though, when you’re trying to work out what’s going on around you, noticing all the different textures, and then it all coming together, probably a bit too late in the term for the conductor’s stress levels!”
“There’s a resonance of connectedness,” agrees Lanigan. “When you’re on the same page, moving to the same beat. You even breathe together – you breathe in and then out to begin. A PhD can be very tense and stressful, and you’re often shut away in a lab on your own. My lab is in the basement, so I am literally resurfacing to come and play in the orchestra. Science and maths are a particular kind of difficult: physics, for example, has an aggressive amount of hours, and it’s good to have friends outside of that.”
Monday rehearsals are usually followed by the pub. “I have made my best friends here,” says Lanigan. “At rehearsal, in concerts and on tour.” And Capps agrees that friendships made are often held for life. “I still have so many friends from Sinfonietta,” he says. “I’ve been to four weddings; our first secretary is coming to stay this weekend. Playing together is an emotional experience, a release from stress. I’m delighted it’s still thriving, and I hope it lives on for a long time to come.”
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