Fast Finger concert

Performed at a great concert at my school on Thursday called fast fingers. I was towards the end of the concert and I played Beethoven's Sonata in G Op.14 No.2 first movement. In my opinion it was a great performance of it and there were many people from my year who weren't there who would have enjoyed hearing it (not to name names but Harry, Jamie and Bella are among the few I can think of). And so as not to deprive these people of the spectacular performance and to make sure that I reach a large variety of people in playing these pieces I have attached a link to the youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbYvnYJEs70

The Bond Responses

Most people say that church music is boring and I can understand why they think that it is. It is all in Latin and no-one can understand what is being said, the words don't change from week to week and the tone of the music is very sombre, but there is a new piece that adapts the text, has the words in English and has a mixture of recognisable tunes: "The Bond Responses." Here is a link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPecQ9eFXs

Trip to CERN in Geneva

In addition to my week of music in February I also had a trip to CERN that I found out about at the last minute. On the Wednesday in our physics lesson we were told a place had opened up for one of us to go to CERN and by the end of the day I had found out I had a place. We then set of on the Friday in the early hours of the morning to Stansted airport to catch the 7:45 plane to Geneva. Once we got there we had a whole afternoon to explore Geneva and see what there was before having a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant. The next day we had a behind the scenes tour at CERN where we got to see examples of the three main parts of the accelerator, a look at the control room and have lunch in the cafeteria where all these great scientists eat, which brings a new meaning to the phrase international food because you pick up your food in France and sit down to eat in Switzerland. After having another few hours to look round Geneva and do some last minute shopping we went back late on Saturday evening with a thoroughly good experience and two days worth of school work to catch up on.

What's been going on-Music

Since my last post (a very long time ago) lots has happened and there's not enough room in one blog post for all of them. Firstly about a month ago I was part of a week with lots of events dedicated to playing music in them. On the Friday there was a concert called the Live Lounge in which I led the school orchestra playing a selection from Les Miserables including "At the end of the day", "Master of the House", "I Dreamed a Dream", "On My Own" and "Do you hear the people sing" after that I was also the leader of the strings group playing Palladio. To end the first half the wind band played a selection of film tunes including Skyfall, the Simspons, Mission Impossible, Batman and Hawaii Five-O. In the second half there was a rousing start from the choir, which I sing bass in, singing "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing" and a selection from "Oliver" including "Consider Yourself", "Where is love", "Oom Pah Pah", "I'd do anything" and "Who Will Buy." Following this we had the steel band playing the theme from Doctor Who and "Under the sea" among other pieces and the Funk Band gave a rousing finale with lots of audience interaction and groovy songs.

The next day there was an inter-school competition for small groups of musicians. Our school had entered four groups. The first group was a Woodwind quartet with a clarinet, two alto saxes, and a tenor sax playing Bill Bailey "Won't you please come home" Following this there was a piano trio featuring me at the piano playing "Romance" Frank Bridge and a piano quartet with me playing, performing a piece of Schumann. Lastly there was another String trio playing "Drei Deutscher Lieder" by Glinker who managed to get through to the next round. There were many other groups from other schools playing for the rest of the day.

Finally on Thursday there was a chamber music concert featuring all those who played on Saturday plus many others to create to atmosphere of a civilised relaxed evening with pleasant background music. All in all it was a hectic week in terms of music trying to learn all these pieces whilst juggling it with revising for my GCSEs

Sherlock Finishes, now we wait until 2016

All Sherlock fans must have experienced this feeling before, after a long wait of nearly 2 years a TV show that you love has returned in full glory, your loving every moment of the show and cannot wait for the next episode, the. Almost as suddenly as it starts it's finished again, waiting on the shelves for yet another 2 year 2YEARS. After series two the producers said and I quote "we will try to get the next series on TV within the year" and yet they didn't get it out within that year, or the next and we saw reports of it being released in April changed to October and then changed to January the next year, however it was worth the wait 100%

The empty hearse- amazing episode especially with the keeping us in the dark on what really happened by giving us crazy conspiracy theories from his fan club. Also loved the horrible trick that Sherlock played on Watson at the end by pretending not to know how to discuss the bomb, an utterly priceless moment. However I was slightly disappointed with the way that Sherlock faked his own death as it was rather "obvious" and the reason most fans would have looked over it was because it wasn't clever enough but it's sneaky how they did that by showing us that we all have som of Sherlock fatal flaw within us. Also I was incredibly proud that I worked out the part about the kidnapper who looked like Sherlock, you saw it on this blog first.

The sign of Three- when I realised that John wasn't going to be meeting Mary for the first time as a client in this adaptation I wondered what they were going to do and it didn't disappoint in the slightest, there was humour and a great mystery all of which wrapped up in an amazing Best man's speech. Also I loved the way we found out more about Mrs Hudson's husband who Sherlock ensured got executed.

His Final Vow- one word to describe this WOW. What an amazing way to end the series with an amazing problem (how to stop the despicable Charles Augustus Magnussen) whilst going through the heartbreak of finding out your wife once was a contract killer. this was possible the best written of all the three episodes and made sure that everyone knew the old Sherlock wasn't dead. Also I loved the mystery at the end of the episode when we find out Moriaty is back and pulling more audacious stunts than ever before and the way Sherlock's exile was done with him being gone for 4 minutes before having to be called back to England was great. I don't have a word of criticism for this episode at all.


I make a plea to any producer of Sherlock who reads this blog DONT MAKE US WAIT ANOTHER TWO YEARS. PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!

On another note I have just taken my Maths GCSE and am slightly worried on the level of boredom attained from doing a 2 hour paper in 35 minutes. How on earth am I going to cope in the summer when I have 21 different exam paper to sit through I do not know

Back to School

After a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas holiday it is now time for me to go back to school. The long tedium that repeats itself day in, day out. Before I have to back to school there is a lot of holiday work that I have to do. For example I have to do 4 hours minimum of making notes for History coursework about the Blitz with a minimum of ten solid pages done in that time, 4 two hour maths papers plus mark them because my GCSE is on FRIDAY, complete a revision pack plus a poster for music, learn all of the vocab for German plus do a diary of the cuban missile crisis for History as well. All in all the History note-taking took 6 hours, the 8 hours of maths papers took 2 hours (it pays to be nerd) music so far took 15 minutes but is still incomplete, I've only spent 30 minutes learning German vocab and I've barely starred my CMC diary for History.

Wish me luck.

On other notes I was rather proud of myself for working out that Sherlock would use the abductor that looked similar in his plans to fake his own death so hurrah for me.

So the rest of my school holiday, the final few hours will be spent doing prep, packing my stuff and if I'm really really really lucky I might get to relax. Who knows?????