In 2024 we presented a programme which featured the re-working of a ballet score, Bliss, that I had written in the 1980s for the Royal Ballet of New Zealand.  Encouraged by the audience’s warm response to the occasion, this concert re-visits that same project.  This time the inspiration for the ballet is Her First Ball, another short story by Katherine Mansfield.  Actress Joanna David will once again read Mansfield’s beautifully observed story and we will then play the score that illustrates the narrative.  Musicians from the BBC Symphony Orchestra will return and join star saxophonist Jonathan Radford; I will be at the piano alongside a regular visitor to Luton Music, the young Bedford-based pianist Leo Little.  This fragile story concerns itself with the loss of youthful innocence and the imperative to survive the disappointment of dreams unfulfilled – its delicate nuanced world is a superb example of Mansfield’s ability to reflect a universality of experience in the more immediate mundanity of life that surrounds us all.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)