Wed 7 March     (Performance Day)

Dress rehearsal

The first of my schools to arrive was St Leonard's and there was ample time for them to practise getting on and off the stage as well as run through their music a couple of times.

The group are now beginning to operate as one musical unit as their composition has also gelled into one whole piece (instead of a sequence of ideas).

After lunch, Saltwood rehearsed their piece.  There was a lot of chair moving logistics to be taken care of with the result that we had only time to run through the piece once, but that was enough: the students knew what they were doing.

For both schools, Rosemary was on hand taking charge of where students should sit when off stage, where they would put their instruments, how they would get on and off stage on either side of their performance as well how to bow to an audience. From my perspective, this input was very welcome as it allowed me to be able to just concentrate on the music and not have to think about anything else.

The Performance

This ran very smoothly mainly thanks to Rosemary and the Gulbenkian technical staff.

The St Leonard's group performed first, and performed well, managing to create and sustain a suitable 'horrorful' atmosphere during their entire piece.  Afterwards the students told me that they had enjoyed doing their piece and that they had thought it had gone really well. They had especially enjoyed seeing the entire front row jump at their loud scary bit.

The Saltwood performance also went well, with the students also very happy about their own performance.  They found it more difficult to sustain a 'horrorful' atmosphere, but then their piece was more melodramatic.  As well as this it had taken the group a while to set up and so I felt the audience's concentration had been broken.  Nevertheless they did well and their music was very much appreciated by the audience.