Winter Music

I'm just back from a wonderful weekend making music at our annual Winter Music Camp. With visiting conductor from Melbourne, Willem van der Wiss, we managed to lick Beethoven's Seventh Symphony into some kind of shape over two days of intense work. We also worked on Cimarosa's Secret Wedding Overture. I squeezed my bike into my little Barina and took it with me, so I managed a couple of rides along the Ulverstone shoreline on some very good cycle paths.
Great fun, good music, fine company.......no cooking!

These photos were taken just at dawn this morning (Sunday) with frost all the way down to the ocean. A bracing ride, to say the least!

Winterlude......The Joy Of Music

I have just spent a weekend away on a winter music camp organized by our community orchestra. Around fifty five enthusiastic instrumentalists gathered at Ulverstone for an intensive few days of music-making.

This is Willem van der Vis, from Melbourne, who was our conductor and mentor for the weekend - he managed to squeeze a reasonable facsimile of a Beethoven Symphony from us by Sunday afternoon!

The ensemble

Fraser - a study in concentration.

An uncharacteristic quite moment in the brass section!

A "backache of basses"!

The loneliness of the long-distance percussionist!

There was time to fly.........

.....play a spot of golf

or just stroll on the beach.

It was a wonderful weekend full of music, laughter and cameraderie. Can't wait to do it again!