Woodlands Farm

About Glenis Malkin

The cellist Glenis Malkin studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama winning several prizes. After gaining an honours degree she went on to complete a post-graduate diploma and won a Shell/London Symphony Orchestra scholarship to perform in a master class with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican centre. She has worked with the Orchestra of St John's Smith Square and the BBC Welsh Symphony orchestra, and has broadcast on Radios 2, 3 and 4 with the Salieri Quartet and the contemporary music group the Acrobats of Desire.

Glenis was a founder member of the highly-acclaimed King's Lynn based Iceni orchestra and co-founder of Anglia Concertante, a 35-strong chamber orchestra made up of players living in the Anglia region. She performs solo and chamber music recitals throughout the country and in 2007 played the complete Vivaldi sonatas at the Lanchester Early Music festival in County Durham. She is musical director of the Lincolnshire Cello Ensemble which in January 2008 was invited by the international cellist Steven Isserlis to perform at the gala opening of the new Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, part of the University of Lincoln.

Glenis teaches cello for Lincolnshire County Council and runs an annual cello day in Spalding each summer which attracts over 70 young performers aged between six and eighteen.

Visit Glenis's music page at www.allsaintskingslynn.org.uk

The Anglia Concertante Concert at Woodlands

The spring concert given on 30th April 2006 by Anglia Concertante was played to a full house in the barn at Woodlands. Interspersed with poetry readings by Clare Best, the farm's artist in residence, the programme was conceived by Glenis to celebrate nature and the farming year. Claire Clarke's oboe solo set the scene when, from the back of a barn, floated the magical, haunting notes of Britten's piece Pan and Niobe from Six Metamorphoses after Ovid.

Pieces by Paul Reade, Richard Rodney Bennett followed, together with some glorious guitar music from David Makin who played Gary Ryan’s Mist Rising, Cloud Nine by Nick Powesland, and the amazing Prelude No 4 by Villa Lobos. Speed across the strings to echo the pitter-patter of hooves, the whirring of wings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, it's said, is the most evocative of the English pastoral composers. While his Linden Lea is considered an iconic example of the folk song tradition, the text of the Benedicite calls upon all creation to praise its maker. For this concert Glenis played his Five English Folk Songs, great cello notes filling the barn and the orchards nearby. Warmth within, warmth without, the barn, the music and the green outdoors.