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