A year after a student performance of the classic Led Zeppelin song Stairway to Heaven at a prizegiving went viral online, the high school band has struck again – this time covering a hit song from British band Coldplay.
Performing again at the school’s end-of-year prizegiving on December 1, about 100 students from Christchurch’s St Andrew’s College took the stage for a seven-minute-long version of Coldplay’s 2008 hit Viva La Vida – inclusive of flute, violin, and guitar solos.
It comes after the school last year made local and international media headlines, with a video of the Stairway to Heaven performance racking up hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes.
St Andrew’s College head of the music department Duncan Ferguson told the Herald he was “real pleased” with how this year’s performance has been received.
“We sort of set the bar high last year and we felt the pressure a bit from all the people who were saying ‘How are you going to top last year’ ... obviously we worked really hard for it [this year],” he said.
Ferguson said the band - made up of different music groups within the school including the senior choir, school orchestra and chamber groups - had been working on the performance since August, but only had the opportunity to practise as a cohort days before the performance.
“It was a really complicated arrangement with people performing out in the middle of the audience and percussion popping up in one part and so to try and get all the sound and lights sorted in the amount of time we had was a bit of a challenge.
“The biggest challenge was trying to just make it all work in the venue on the day, because for prizegiving rehearsal we only got into the arena that morning and only had an hour to really work on it, so it was super tight,” he said.
He said about 70 or 80 students involved in the performance also featured in last year’s Stairway to Heaven rendition, the most prominent being James McIver (Year 13) who again excelled on the guitar this year.
“He was the acoustic guitarist last year and he had some big solos in that.”
Other students taking centre stage this year were singers Xanthe Pearce, Chantelle Xiong and Hugo Ranken, and instrumental soloists Jasmine Hooker (cello), Miu Kim (flute) and Sea-am Thompson (violin).
Ferguson said a number of juniors were now coming through the other end, with the school’s orchestra being open to Year 7s.
Asked about how the reaction stacked up to last year, Ferguson said it had been a “bit slower” on Facebook and YouTube, but someone had posted the performance to social media platform TikTok, which had been viewed almost 300,000 times.
“Anytime you get 30,000 views on YouTube and Facebook, that’s nothing to be sniffed. We’re really proud of that, it’s amazing.
“It’s really nice scrolling through the comment sections and seeing how many people are touched by it and have an emotional response to it and I guess that’s why we do it. We don’t so much do it for ourselves, we do it for others to enjoy it.”
As for the song choice, Ferguson said he originally planned to organise a performance of Queen, but was quickly reminded by his students that it was performed by the college about five years ago. The students then suggested Viva La Vida.
Looking ahead to next year Ferguson said he has a couple of ideas that are “quite different sorts of things”, but it depends on which students step up during the first half of the year.
“It really does come down to who we’ve got next year, how they are working and how reliable they’ve been around this music department and who we want to reward.
“I think that’s the main lesson I learned from Stairway to Heaven last year is not to just choose a song and make it fit with the students, but really look at the students and take into account what kind of music is going to work well for that particular cohort.”
Benjamin Plummer is an Auckland-based reporter who covers breaking news. He has worked for the Herald since 2022.
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