Greetings, dear reader! You can add a comment if you wish...
COMMENT from: Ian Pearce (London, Tue Oct 21 05:30:12 2008)
Here is one of the friends you neglected to contact.....lol....how did it go at the Opera House???Mon Jun 9 10:18:40 2008
Carmina Burana concert last Friday was the biggest buzz! All went very well, despite 300 singers squished onto the stage with barely room to open our music scores! Llewellyn hall was sold out, huge ovation at end! And we're doing it again in Sydney next month, at the Opera House... whooo-hoo!!!!Sun Apr 27 08:45:06 2008
Plenty has happened since last entry...
Am continuing to rehearse with Llewellyn Choir, for Carmina Burana in June, with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. This will be huge (we combine with some other Canberra choirs), very noisy, and great fun!took a few days off work to go to Uni of New England in Armidale on April 12 to graduate again, returning with Grad.Dip.Comp.Sc. appended to my name!
Bell Shakespeare Company is in Canberra again: I saw their performance of As You Like It a few days ago - very witty, and a great performance as I've come to expect from them.
Meanwhile, at work, we are busy redeveloping our IT system with the aid of some contractors, as well as trying to keep the old system limping along.
Life is never, ever boring. That's for sure.
Mon Mar 10 08:18:43 2008
Have joined the Llewellyn Choir of Canberra, rehearsing for a performance of Bach's St John Passion on March 19, a few days before Easter. Wonderful to sing some of the greatest music ever writtten with a large choir, and of course the performance will be accompanied by a chamber orchestra.I forgot to enter here another recent musical highlight: saw Nigel Kennedy's concert in Sydney with the Sydney Symphony last month. The Beethoven Violin Concerto - stunning! Kennedy, dressed like a tramp looking as if he hasn't washed for a year, played the most exquisite, sensitive and utterly beautiful rendition of the second movement that I have ever heard! Then in between playing, he turns into a great comedian, chatting and clowning around with the audience. A truly memorable night!
Thu Jan 24 08:51:04 2008
Taking a week off work in lieu of having done extra over Christmas. Just spent a few days in Victoria, to catch the last couple of days of the Ballarat's music festival ("Organs of the Goldfields"). Some excellent choral singing from a Melbourne group, 'Gloriana', in the final recital: a mass for double choir by Frank Martin, plus the Duruflé Requiem. And I saw the Monty Python musical "Spamalot" in Melbourne... Brilliant! Was still whistling "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" 24 hours later!Sat Dec 22 20:08:10 2007
So much for making regular entries in this blog. The last few months have been too busy.On November 7, I sat my final uni exam, and since then there's still been no let-up, as work has been full-on. Hopefully things will settle back to a more normal pace in the new year.
Still, at least I passed my final study unit (Advanced Web Technologies) with a distinction: it was very interesting - all java-based, servlets and JSP pages. Now I can go up to UNE in Armidale and graduate again in April!
Well, if anyone reads this before 2008, Happy Christmas and Happy New Year.
Sun Jul 8 18:17:19 2007
Just returned from holiday in Europe! Instead of writing about it here, I've added a web page to my Armchair Travel pages - click Home and follow the link...Sun May 27 20:28:05 2007
I'm catching up on my Shakespeare, finally, after all those years prior to 1999 living in the tropics! Two nights ago, I went to Bell Shakespeare's production of Othello, with Aboriginal actor Wayne Blair in the lead role, Marcus Graham as Iago and Leeanna Walsman as Desdemona. I had a front-row seat, and the energy and intensity of their performances (especially from that distance - I could have reached out and touched then!) was breathtaking.Last year, I saw Bell Shakespeare's production of The Tempest, with John Bell himself as Prospero, also very memorable. Can't wait for whatever they come up with next!
Back in the real world, my uni exam for this semester is in 3 weeks time. Then it's holiday time for the following 3 weeks... Austria, Graz Styriarte festival, here I come again!...
Tue Apr 17 21:21:52 2007
Last night, saw special preview (for ABC Classic FM Listeners) of the new movie 'Copying Beethoven', a fictional account of a young woman, with aspirations to become a composer, engaged by an ageing, hard-to-get-on-with Beethoven to copy out the orchestral parts for his 9th Symphony. How the two develop a mutual respect and a need for each other's support... a terrific drama, laced with some great little unexpected bits of humour. This film would convert a pop-music fan to Beethoven. See it!!! (Thank you, ABC!)Wed Apr 4 20:35:38 2007
COMMENT from: Nigel (Canberra, Mon Feb 19 15:52:17 2007)
The choir of St John's, Canberra, in which I sing, did a service of 'Lessons and Carols' for Palm Sunday: a similar format to the traditional Lessons and Carols at Christmas. An interesting variety of material, which we'd been practising for the last few weeks, including the Lamentations by Bairstow, and a modern anthem, Solus ad Victimam, by Kenneth Leighton, which I really enjoyed. Hymns included a couple of the Bach passion chorales. Went very well, and we'll repeat some of the music for the Easter services. Sadly, our choirmaster, Terry Norman, has announced he'll be leaving in 3 months. Hopefully we'll be able to keep this sort of thing up with someone new.
Study in full swing, I'm at least 2 weeks behind, but I get a chance to catch up now while the uni has a mid-semester break!
This is what a comment looks like!Mon Feb 19 10:46:30 2007
Ah, but it's time to get real again. Uni year starts today! Two more units to go to complete my Grad Dip Comp Sc. This semester: Compiler Construction. Looks a bit scary, but should be an interesting programming exercise...Sun Feb 11 08:28:47 2007
Third concert within seven days, last night, and this was huge: the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Richard Tognetti performing for the first time on the 1743 del Gesu violin recently lent to him by an anonymous donor.
A double-whammy of Beethoven - the violin concerto and the Eroica symphony. A sellout concert, Canberra's Llewellyn Hall was packed. Took my niece Angela along, who's a Beethoven fan, and I'd only just managed to get two seats booking a week beforehand.
Anyway, a knockout concert. Nice bright tempos in the violin concerto. The ACO is consistently world-class!Thu Feb 08 08:43:14 2007
This is going to be a big week for music! Last night the Tallis Scholars, England's renowned performers of Renaissance choral music, performed in Canberra, and I went along.
All entirely unaccompanied... pure polyhonic perfection! Program included Palestrina's Stabat Mater and the famous Miserere by Allegri. The latter was very effective, sound-wise, with the Scholars' ten voices split into two small choirs, one singing from offstage.Sun Feb 04 21:32:08 2007
The weblog begins!
Today there was an afternoon organ recital at St John's, by Hans Hielscher, visiting from the Marktkirche in Wiesbaden, Germany. He played a modern-ish, but not outlandish selection (Rheinberger, Rawsthorne etc) and got some interesting sounds out of our organ. Styles St Johns doesn't get to hear very often.