TALENTED Hannah Allaway from Kington has been appointed as the principal harpist for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYO) for 2016.

Hannah, 17, who is head girl at Lady Hawkins School in Kington, and a Herefordshire county badminton player, has been playing the harp for 10 years.

More than 800 talented teenaged musicians auditioned for the NYO over summer and Hannah was one of the 165 who were considered to be the most talented and enthralling young orchestral musicians nationally by NYO’s world-class panel of professional music tutors.

Hannah has played harp with the NYO for the past two years and was a harpist with the National Children’s Orchestras for the previous five years. She is excited to be playing once again with Britain’s premier teenaged orchestra. As an added bonus, Hannah has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Arts Scholarship towards her seat in the NYO this year.

Hannah’s music has taken her to many top class performance venues throughout Britain, and has included playing with the NYO at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall for the past two years and a concert tour to Germany.

This year she will spend about 50 days with the NYO in three residential orchestral training courses in London, Nottingham and Birmingham during school holidays and various outreach programmes encouraging music in schools. She has already performed twice with the NYO this year at Leeds Town Hall and in a concert broadcast on BBC Radio 3 from the Barbican in London.

The orchestra’s bookings later this year include the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall and the Symphony Hall, Birmingham and the NYO is scheduled to record a CD in summer. Hannah is looking forward to the musical challenges of leading the harp section and playing with what Sir Mark Elder described as “indisputably one of the very, very best teenaged orchestras in the world”.

Hannah will be raising funds towards the cost of being in the orchestra and will be playing her harp and busking at locations around Herefordshire and Mid Wales.