Andrew Sparling

Andrew Sparling spent his first 19 years in Berkshire and played clarinet in the Reading Youth Orchestra conducted by Robert Roscoe. He was also a member of the Berkshire Youth Orchestra, and the Maidenhead Concert Orchestra. His most recent orchestral performance in the county was playing bass and E flat clarinets in Mahler’s First Symphony with CSO at Wellington College.

Playing the clarinet has taken him from Ho Chi Minh City to Carnegie Hall, and singing from Darlington to St Leonards on Sea. He had initally intended to specialise in portraying characters that were old or unpleasant, or old and unpleasant: Dr Bartolo in The Marriage of Figaro, Don Alfonso in Cosi fan tutte, Zuniga and Morales in Carmen, and Alfio / Tonio in Cavalleria rusticana / Pagliacci, but he has recently played two nice people, the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury George Talbot in Maria Stuart and the musician Schaunard in La Bohème.

He maintains contact with Berkshire mostly by playing Bach fugues with the CSO clarinet section and by touring with Barefoot Opera to Norden Farm in Maidenhead. In February 2018 he is taking part in a triple bill of short operas for three singers in Islington and St Albans, including works by Offenbach and Whittaker.

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