U3A?

Cheryl McKellar and David McKay, with Joan and Bill Bergen in the corner

U3A, or University of the Third Age, is an organisation for people over fifty, no longer working full time. The Bathurst branch is very popular and always has lots of different programs to appeal to a wide range of interests.

The Music Appreciation program has been going for over ten years. It is currently run at the beginning of the fourth school term. Each week we listen to some live music, hear some fascinating information about an aspect of Music, and also listen to some recordings to complement the talk and live music.

Over the past eight years we have explored

J S Bach
Mozart
Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn (all born within a year of one another)
the beginnings of Russian classical Music
British Music of the Twentieth Century
G F Handel
Australian Classical Music
French Music

Proposed future topics include:

Haydn
Beethoven
Bach's sons

Music Is For Life

For the past six weeks, Mitchell Conservatorium has been hosting a Music Appreciation program for Bathurst's University of the Third Age. Each year in Term 4, David McKay presents a one hour program which includes interesting top-quality performances and recordings of music on a selected theme. This year we have been focussing on French Music from the past two hundred years.

Performers have included Julia Romano, who sang French chansons by Debussy and Fauré, Glen Wholohan, who played movements from an enjoyable, jazzy saxophone suite by Jean Françaix, Chloe Walker, who played an arrangement of Debussy's first Arabesque for flute and piano, and Joan and David McKay, who played Fauré's beloved Dolly suite for piano duet.

For the final week's program, Cheryl McKellar played Tango en Skai by Roland Dyens, which you can hear played by the composer himself in the video at the head of this post.

Mitchell Conservatorium's first director, Laurie Orchard, inaugurated the Bathurst Music Appreciation program in the 1990s. David McKay is humbled and honoured to be following in his distinguished footsteps. (Laurie, an octogenarian, is still hosting a U3A Music Appreciation program in Lismore, where he now lives.)