The point of it all...

After all the stress of Friday, I am glad to say that Saturday turned out to be a wonderful day.

It was an early start - we left the house at 7:30am, which is quite painful for a Saturday and the doors opened at 9am.  After registration and general introduction, we were straight into the sectional rehearsals - done with just the amateur participants.  I was rather alarmed to find that I was the only one on first oboe so it was definitely straight in at the deepend.  It wasn't too scary in the end though as the general atmosphere was very encouraging and supportive, everyone was finding the music hard.  The 90 minutes rehearsal flew by and is was soon lunch time.

After lunch it was full orchestral rehearsal for nearly 3 hours (with a tea break fortunately).  The professional players joined us for this which made it a bit less scary - they covered the hardest bits, made sure we came in at the right time, but also took a little bit of  back seat when it came to the solos to let the participants have a go.  It was really great to hear the whole piece come together and the sound was amazing. 

Just time for a cup of tea and a piece of cake before the final performance.  The concert was great fun, the sound was fab and, despite my misgivings about the difficulty of the music, we pulled it off.  I think the professionals were definitely covering a lot of the Stravinsky bits but I still managed the (very short) exposed oboe bits in the Beceuse. The Gershwin was definitley my highlight though - a really, really fun piece to play that I don't think I would ever have had the opportunity to play!

So overall, a fantastic day which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to.  I managed to play more of the music than I thought I would and both my reed and lip lasted to the end despite about 5-6 hours playing.  I really enjoyed joining with other people and playing beautiful music in a fabulous concert hall.  This really is the point of all the lessons and practice after all.

We played:
Walton - Crown Imperial (a good warm up opener)
Gershwin - An American in Paris (some amazing solos from the brass and clarinets, great fun!)
Stravinsky - Firebird extract, Infernal Dance to the end (challenging but we pulled it off)