About Us
Our History | Conductor | Leader | Committee
Our History
Originally known as The Old Barn Orchestral Society, the orchestra was originally formed in 1927 from a group of keen amateur musicians, among them Ernest Parkes, a teacher of violin and viola, who was elected as the first conductor. The orchestra was fortunate to have the free use of the music room formed in the old barn attached to Abbey Court, Sandling, the home at the time of the late Dr. Constant Ponder, himself an amateur clarinettist and head of a family whose members, as they grew up both physically and musically, joined the orchestra to contribute to the violin, cello and double bass sections of the strings, and to the oboes and clarinets of the woodwind!
The orchestra flourished through the 1930s giving concerts mainly in churches, schools and Maidstone Prison and performing with considerable success in competitive festivals in Kent and North London. Activities were suspended during the war, but the orchestra was revived in November 1945. From a modest start, it grew again until it could no longer be contained in the old barn and it moved successively to Oakwood House, the Hollingworth Hall, the Grammar School in Albion Place, North Borough Primary School and then to the hall forming part of Christchurch, Park Wood. In more recent years, the orchestra has been based in St. Martin's Church, Northumberland Road in Maidstone.
With the benefit of free practice accommodation, in the early years, the orchestra was self-supporting from modest subscriptions by its members; indeed, at least until 1969, it was able to make significant contributions to good causes from concert proceeds. With successive moves to hired practice rooms and the rising cost of concert halls, the orchestra's liabilities have increased considerably and are no longer matched by the substantially higher subscriptions paid by playing members.
In 1984, a new society "Friends of the Old Barn Orchestra" was constituted to assist and encourage the study and performance of orchestral music and, in particular, to support the Old Barn Orchestra. This sister society can raise and receive funds from which amounts may be given or loaned to the orchestra to enable it to flourish. Funds already held embrace voluntary contributions from former and present playing members and include a very substantial gift which allowed new timpani to be bought in memory of Mrs Margaret Ponder, wife of the orchestra's original sponsor and benefactor.
In the 1950s, the conductor was also Director of the Kent Rural Music School (now Kent Music), and she encouraged many music teachers to play in the orchestra. There are still several teachers in the orchestra, although there is no formal link with Kent Music. In the last thirty years, conductors have been Frank Ray, Martyn Williams, Michael Downes, Christopher Hayward, Bryan Gipps and Dwight Pile-Gray.
Since the 1990s, programmes have included Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto, Vaughan Williams’ Tuba Concerto, the first performance in Kent of Percy Whitlock’s Organ Symphony and less conventional music from the likes of Poulenc, Krommer and Milhaud. Familiar great composers have not been neglected, and the list includes the great symphonists Franck, Balakirev and Bruckner.
Since 2013 the schedule has included symphonies by Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, as well as shorter works by Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Donizetti, Gluck, Järnefelt and Elgar. The orchestra currently rehearses for these concerts in the Maidstone area on Friday evenings in term time. We pride ourselves on being a friendly group with a number of social events in addition to concerts and rehearsals. We also try to give an opportunity for local young musicians, particularly the Medway Young Musician of the year, to experience playing with an orchestra.
The orchestra has been conducted by Ben Knowles since 2022 and was rebranded in 2023 to The Maidstone & Medway Sinfonia to differentiate between the orchestral concerts and the society’s other musical activities.