About SWON
We are a group of friendly, enthusiastic musicians based in East Finchley, North London. Founded in 1998 by Stephen Kersley and Stuart Allen (SWON’s conductor at the time) with a start-up grant from Barnet Council, we have now been producing varied and exciting music for two decades for the interest and enjoyment of the local community. Our current membership comprises around 50 musicians and our musical director and conductor is Matthew Hardy.
We rehearse on Wednesday evenings 7.45pm-9.45pm at Martin Primary School in East Finchley. We have three terms per year with a concert at the end of each term. Our current concert venue is St. Martin’s Church, Gospel Oak.
Aside from our principal concerts, we also regularly take part in festivals and joint concerts with other ensembles. We have taken part in the National Concert Band Festival, in which we earned gold awards for three years running in 2014, 2015 and 2016. We have also been fortunate to enjoy working closely with other wind orchestras and choirs from London, Italy, and Liverpool.
Aside from performing regularly in North London, we enjoy taking our music further afield. Past tours have included concerts in Antwerp in 2007, Reims in 2013, Liverpool in July 2017 and Poole/Bournemouth in June 2018.
SWON is keen to nurture young composing talent, and as such we held a ‘Young Composers’ Competition’ in 2013. We were rewarded with three outstanding pieces of repertoire that formed the backbone of our 2015/16 concert season.
We are committed to producing high quality and enjoyable performances both for our members and the local community, whilst being accessible to all who wish to be involved.
About Our Conductor
We are delighted to welcome Christopher Braime to take over as Musical Director of SWON from April 2019.
Christopher Braime was born in 1983 and was awarded a Foundation Scholarship to study oboe and conducting at the Royal College of Music. He is
active as a conductor throughout the UK and Europe. Christopher is also Musical Director of the London Gay Symphony Orchestra, the Putney Choral Society, and the Southampton Youth Orchestra.
Christopher recently made his debut at Symphony Hall Birmingham, conducting the Birmingham Schools Symphony Orchestra and is active as a guest conductor, he has worked with the Farnborough Symphony Orchestra, the Redhill Sinfonia, the Suffolk Sinfonia, the Kensington Philharmonic Orchestra and the Petersfield Orchestra. In 2013, he made his European conducting
debut with the Orquestra do Algarve, Portugal, and has recently conducted in Germany and Amsterdam.
In the 2019/20 season he will be returning to the Suffolk Sinfonia where he maintains a very happy guest conducting relationship with the orchestra whilst also working with SWON to continue our development as a community music group.