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Harrisons’ has won the School’s 2011 Inter-House Music Competition in style – having already run away with the contest by the end of the Junior and Beginner classes.

A combination of the number of Harrisons’ performers entered and their high placings left the other houses trailing in their wake. “The Harrisons’ senior performers were both placed, although their house could not have been caught by the others in any case,” said Director of Music, Kieron Howe, after the Senior Class performances in the Main School Hall brought this year’s competition to a conclusion.

This term’s Intermediate, Singing, Ensemble and Senior classes were all held recently on the same day. The Beginner and Junior classes were held in July.

The adjudicator for the Intermediate, Singing and Ensemble classes was Richard Morrison, Senior Music Critic of The Times, who enjoyed a broad programme with works from Saint-Saëns and Vivaldi to Jardanyi and Bernstein. Ian Hope, the Director of Music at St Margaret’s School in Bushey, was the adjudicator for the Senior Class. Mr Hope has directed, arranged and composed for a huge variety of groups across the country, including the English Schools’ Choir and QE’s own Concert Band.

For the Senior and Intermediate class competitions, Sixth Form house members were given responsibility for selecting some of the soloists and for forming ensembles. They also had the task of organising and directing the rehearsals with no help from any member of staff. “The standard of the performances was excellent and a huge statement to the quality of musicianship in our Sixth-Formers,” said Mr Howe.

The performers were accompanied by Danielle Salamon, one of the Music Department’s instrumental teachers. In recent years she has performed and lectured in London, Paris and across Australia.

The individual winner from the senior competition was Year 12 student, Praveen Prathapan (pictured).

For the second year in a row, a QE team has beaten off stiff opposition from leading schools to secure a place in the national finals of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Top of the Bench competition.

Across eight rounds of the Chilterns and Middlesex heat, the four QE chemists amassed 93 points – comfortably ahead of next-placed Harrow School and Merchant Taylors’, both of which had 84. QE now progresses to the national finals at Imperial College in March.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This victory is a fitting accolade for an outstanding Chemistry department, which prepares boys meticulously for exceptional achievements.” Mr Enright congratulated Chemistry teacher, Dr Elizabeth Kuo, and the School’s Head of Science, Dr Malcolm Russell, “on guiding the boys to success again in this prestigious competition”.

Teams in the competition must comprise two Year 9 students and one each from Years 10 and 11. For QE, these were Pranesh Varadarajan and Alexander Wingrave (Year 9), Bhavik Mehta (Year 10) and Abhishek Mukherjee (Year 11).

The competition requires entrants to demonstrate subject knowledge beyond what is required for the curriculum for their age. The national finals will involve them carrying out practical work and solving problems.

Dr Kuo said: "Our team did really well, hardly dropping a point.” She added that one of last year’s successful team, Mehul Jesani, who is now in Year 12, had given up his time to help the boys prepare.

Talented tenor Rhys Bowden (OE 1996-2003) has been building a name for himself as a professional classical singer since leaving the School.

This year alone has seen singing him in Rigoletto for Scottish Opera and performing twice with Surrey Opera – once in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and once as Luiz in The Gondoliers – while other performances have taken him to destinations including the Isle of Wight (Monteverdi’s Vespers and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride) and Fareham (Mozart’s Requiem).

Over the past few years, music has taken him much further afield – to Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Singapore, Fiji, South America, Lapland and to many parts of both eastern and western Europe. “I’ve visited Bach’s church in Leipzig, sung to the King of Samoa, and performed in a canyon in the Australian Outback,” he says.

His enthusiasm for music was fired when he was at the School. “I first started taking singing seriously when I was 16. Kieron Howe [QE’s Director of Music] suggested I take singing lessons, and by the end of the year I auditioned for and got into the National Youth Choir. It was then that I realised that I wanted to be a singer, so I owe a lot to my musical experiences at QE. There was so much music going on there, with plenty of opportunities to perform! I sang in the choir and played saxophone in the Jazz Band, Saxophone Quartet and the Concert Band. One of the highlights was recording a CD with the Jazz Band.”

After leaving School, Rhys was a choral scholar at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, and then went on to study music at Girton College, Cambridge, where he performed frequently with the college choir and the university’s opera society and chamber choir. After graduating in 2007, he studied singing on the postgraduate course at the Royal Academy of Music in London from where he graduated in 2009 with a distinction and won the Hilda Anderson Deane Prize.

A growing number of QE alumni are staying in touch with the Sri Sathya Sai English Medium School in Vallanad, Kerala – a village in South West India. In 2011 several old boys took the time to pay a visit, each spending time at the School which QE has supported since 2002.

In November, Cameron Bentley (2002-2009), pictured, visited and four old boys went to visit in the summer. Nir Shah (2004-11), Akshaya Ahuja (2003-10), Nikhil Khagram (2003-08) and Sagar Thanki (2003-10) are all currently undergraduates at Cambridge. “It was an incredibly satisfying and humbling experience and I would definitely encourage other students and teachers to visit the school,” said Sagar, who was touring India with Akshaya and Nikhil. By coincidence, Nir was there at the same time.

Urmil Mehta (2002-2009) who is reading medicine at Queen’s, Cambridge, was involved in the Sai School Appeal during his time at QE and has also maintained his links with Kerala.

The Sai School Appeal comfortably exceeded its own £4,000 fund-raising target for 2011, thanks to a highly successful event for parents and teachers. The Masti evening during the Autumn Term was the climax of a year of fund-raising.

2011 leaver Sam Sherman (School Captain 2010-2011) is studying Anthropology at Cambridge; the result, he says, of his study of the Maasai tribe as part of the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) that he took alongside A-levels.

Along with his other studies, Sam spent a year on his EPQ – which was introduced at the School in 2010. Equivalent to half an A-level, the EPQ offers students the chance to study a topic of their choice in depth.

Following his research and a visit to Kenya, Sam produced a 10,000-word dissertation looking at the impacts of the Maasai Mara National Park on the tribe.

“My Extended Project effectively introduced me to anthropology – which became my chosen discipline at university – and to the idea of ‘cultural relativism’. I found that before the project I had neglected the hugely significant psychological impacts of colonisation, focusing instead on the more tangible social and economic.”

His research took him from the libraries of universities in London to personal communications with ‘modern Maasai’ and anthropologists. Subsequently he returned to Maasailand and conducted a quasi-ethnographic study amongst the Maasai: spending a large part of his Year 13 summer holiday living with a family of Maasai in rural Kenya.