Haberdashers’ Adams wins the Haberdashers’ Young Musician of the Year competition for the first time.
The annual competition, now in its sixth year, is part of the Haberdashers’ Advantage – Character programme, that seeks to build a sense of community between pupils across the seventeen Haberdasher schools, providing cultural capital and character development opportunities.
Each secondary Haberdasher school is invited to send one competitor to perform at the Haberdashers’ Hall. The nine competitors delighted the judges and audience with a diverse, range of performances on clarinet, violin, piano, cello and vocals. This year’s competition was judged by singer Alessandro Fisher, cellist Adrian Bradbury and pianist Catherine Milledge.
Congratulations to Arjun Toora in Upper Sixth who performed Liebestraume by Liszt beautifully on the Hall’s grand piano.
Arjun is a multi-faceted musician. He is currently working on his diploma for piano but is also Grade 8 on the cello and is a highly capable trumpeter, organist, accordionist, flautist and French horn player. In recent years, Arjun has taken a keen interest in conducting, taking on the challenge of running the City of Wolverhampton choir as well as regularly conducting the school orchestra. Arjun has also played leading roles in a number of Adams’ musical theatre productions, such as Javert in last summer’s production of Les Misérables. Arjun manages to juggle all these activities with being one of our two school captains.
Arjun reflected: “The Haberdashers’ Musician of the Year Competition was an amazing experience, and I’m lucky to have been able to go twice having accompanied Henry last year. Even though there are many Haberdashers with impressive jobs and titles, everyone is always really friendly and they always go out of their way to talk to you. The competition itself was fierce, and I’m honoured to have been chosen as the winner! Despite being really nervous beforehand, performing in front of the Haberdashers was a surprisingly fun and rewarding experience, and I hope to visit the Hall again soon.”
Taking A-levels in Economics, English, Maths and Music, Arjun has accepted an offer to study Music at the University of Cambridge and plans to follow this with a law conversion course. We wish him all the best.
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