Study Week!

So the semester is nearly over and it's once again study week.


The last few weeks have been so busy. Last week I had two concerts with the Faith Court orchestra. On Wednesday and Thursday we played to a full house in the Music Auditorium at WAAPA. It was quite a short concert comprising of only two pieces. Ben Martin joined the orchestra for the first half of the concert to perform Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2. After the interval the orchestra performed Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5. I think the theme of the concert was Russian Romantics. The Russian's are in vogue at the moment. WASO just gave a concert entitled Russian Fire and WAYO is playing The Rite of Spring in its next concert. The Faith Court concerts went well. On the first night we performed the Tchaikovsky better than the Shostakovich and I think on the second night we gave an excellent performance of the Shostakovich but the Tchaikovsky didn't quite have the energy it did on Wednesday night. Neville Cohn wrote a favourable review of the Wednesday night performance for the West Australian.


On Tuesday Eneksis sang in the free classical lunchtime concert at WAAPA. Eneksis is a chamber choir at WAAPA which one of my lecturers runs. I auditioned for it for the first time this year and was, I have to admit, a little surprised when I got in. This was the second concert for the choir this year, but I had a cold during the first performance, which was combined with the WAAPA strings and so didn't sing, but I played in the string orchestra. The Tuesday lunchtime concert performance went quite well, I think. Photos of the performance are on Facebook somewhere...


On Friday night I had a rehearsal with WAYO for the Sunday conert "The Planets". The rehearsal was originally scheduled for Thursday night but got postponed to Friday because of the Faith Court Orchestra Concert. Most of the brass players in Faith Court are also in WAYO as are three of the violists. Four before Alix quit WAYO. We had another WAYO rehearsal on Saturday morning but I came down with something over the course of Friday and felt really sick by then end of that night's rehearsal. So I spent Saturday in bed. However by Sunday I was feeling well enough, and stubborn enough, to go to that morning's "sound check" and to play in the concert that afternoon. I put sound check in quotation marks because usually the soundcheck comprises of topping and tailing the pieces we're playing and maybe going over some of the more tricky questions. But on Sunday morning we went through all the pieces in full. We played Bolero twice! Personally I think this wasn't a great idea, because we only had two hours to recover afterwards and I know the brass player could've done with more recovery time. Myself I wasn't feeling great anyway, because I was still a little sick so I didn't have that much expendable energy. The concert still went well, I think. :-)



After the concert I got changed into some blacks that were less cleavagy and covered my knees and got a lift with someone to a temple in Warwick where we were performing a Cantata which Sam Parry had arranged. We got some dinner when we got there and then we performed it. I think the performance went well. A few of us had already been in the WAYO performance (including Sam) and were correspondingly tired, but it was a good performance to a big audience.


This week is study week. Right now I'm waiting for some chicken nuggets or something to finish. I put them in the oven about 20 minutes ago, so they're nearly done. After I've eaten some lunch I'll have to get onto practicing. I'm competing in the Warana Music Award Heats 2009 tomorrow. The Warana Music Award is the concerto competition at WAAPA. It was held for the first time last year and it is quite competitive. This year there are 24 hopefulls competing, three of which will go through to a final performing with the faith court orchestra and one of those will be the winner. Last year the finalists were Madeline Antoine, Joshua Webster and Aidan Boase. Aidan won. I don't think I will go through to the final, mainly because I know how well everyone else in the heats plays. I entered for the experience and because I don't have a performance exam this semester because I'm an Ed student. So it gave me something to work towards. Unfortunately I was insanely busy over the last few weeks and then got sick over the weekend (I spend Monday in bed, recovering from Sunday) so I haven't practised my piece as much as I would've hoped. Thankfully I had it up to performance standard before all the bussy-ness kicked in. So, lunch is cooked, time to eat and then do some practise.