Dance Sequence by Gareth Wood
Performed by Rhiannon Symonds (16), accompanied by the Fodens Band directed by Michael Fowles.
Live recording on Saturday 25 January 2014 at the BBC Philharmonic Studios for the Semi-Final of the BBC Radio 2 Young Brass Award 2014.
With very grateful thanks to BBC for allowing the use of this recording for Rhiannon's A Level performance.

Rhiannon Symonds - Dance Sequence (BBC Radio 2 Young Brass Award 2014 Semi - Final)

One day my husband woke up to a message from our good friend, Jason Carr, who said he had felt inspired to write us a duet! We were thrilled to receive such a lovely, personal gift, and even more delighted to discover it was influenced by our rescue dog, Dillon (Husky x Labrador) who we rescued back in January, a few weeks after we'd got married!

Thank you Jason for this piece, we hope we do it justice for you!

The sheet music is available for purchase at www.MarkHarrisonTrumpet.com

For a limited time, all proceeds from purchase will be donated to Dogs Trust, as that's where we rescued our little bundle of joy from!

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Composer's note:

Mr & Mrs H Walk The Dog In The Rain

I met Mark Harrison in 2019 at Manchester’s bijou Hope Mill Theatre, where he was playing trumpet in my seven piece orchestration of Jerry Herman’s Mame. Mark not only plays fabulously, but also has a deep love of classic musicals, so we got on famously, and I was pleased to be able to plan a reunion for 2020 at the same address for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, this time also to feature Mark’s new wife Rhiannon on trombone. Alas, these plans were scuppered by the pandemic, but Mark proceeded to produce a sequence of videos of numbers from Cinderella, featuring my arrangements and the planned Hope Mill cast and band. By way of thanks - and as good mental exercise during quarantine - I thought I’d attempt composing a duet for the newlyweds.

I remembered my first tasks as a student composer at Guildhall had been to write instrumental solos and duos (excluding polyphonic piano or harp etc), which had seemed an exactingly monastic proposition at the time. I hoped I would fare better 35 years later - I can at least say I felt less self-conscious!

It was my intention to treat the two brass players even-handedly. In the end, the trombone took the lion share of The Ungrateful Riff, while the trumpet gets more of the jazzy tune. If I ever expand this into a suite, I’ll try to redress the balance.

For the record, the title came AFTER the music - I just wanted to make it personal to Mark and Rhi, and including their new four-legged family member only seemed polite. In a slightly esoteric way, the title is my sly tribute to Bernstein’s Mr & Mrs Webb Say Goodnight.

And now this introduction is much longer than the piece in question.

Happy music-making!

Jason Carr
August 2020

Mr and Mrs H Walk The Dog In The Rain - Jason Carr

I am a tenor trombonist living in the Gran area of Norway, with doubling instruments of alto trombone, euphonium & voice.

Rhiannon Harrison