Preview: Memorial Concert For Laura Webb, St James's Church, London
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Your support makes all the difference.A special concert is being held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, in memory of Laura Webb, who was killed in the London bombings of 7 July 2005. The 29-year-old, from Islington, north London, died in the explosion at Edgware Road on her way to work as a PA at the advertising company DDB Europe in Paddington. This event has been organised by Rebecca Driver, the sister of Webb's partner, who, along with other members of Webb's family, spent days searching for their missing family member in London's hospitals, in the aftermath of the carnage. Her death was confirmed a week later.
"If she had not been late getting to work that morning, she would still be alive," says Driver. "It is hard to accept her death because she was killed for such a pointless cause."
The concert opens with Barber's emotive Adagio for Strings and is followed by Bruch's romantic popular classic Violin Concerto No 1 in G minor. It will be performed by the South Bank Symphony, a non-professional orchestra largely made up of ex-music graduates and some extra friends, with special guest conductor Neil Thompson, the head of conducting at the Royal College of Music. Driver, who plays the flute in the South Bank Symphony, will perform in the concert's final piece, Elgar's Enigma Variations.
All proceeds will go to Save the Children's Early Child Care and Development project in Vietnam to fund the upgrading and building of 20 pre-school classes in the district of Tien Yien, in Vietnam, a country Webb fell in love with while she was travelling in Asia.
For Driver - also the Chair of the orchestra - the concert "was the obvious thing to do". She started organising it at the end of last year, and hopes to fill all 550 seats of the church.
"Her death has left a void we are never going to fill," she says of her sister. "However much time is a healer, we are never going to forget this horror. It is such a tragic way to die for all of the 52 victims of the London bombings."
Saturday, 7.30pm (0870 163 3833; www.rfh.org.uk); tickets: £15 minimum donation. If you wish to make a donation, call 020-7012 6400, quoting 'D60 KDJ GO1'
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