Week 6

I had a day off work today.  Still really enjoying it but I needed today as a sorting out day.  One of those days where you send emails you’ve been getting around to, pay bills that need paying, spend time filing away papers, alphabetising music instead of keeping it in a pile on the floor and, most importantly, I was able to do a good stint of practice.  Yay!

So, last Saturday I was in Sheffield playing some Wagner with Sheffield Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dane Lam (hi Dane!).  There were two harps!  Myself and the lovely Alley York.  I’ve never been a big Wagner fan to be honest – haven’t grown into it yet.  But we were doing excerpts from Wagner’s Ring Cycle so that was that.  Only, some of it looked a tad tricky:

And the hilarious thing is, you can hardly even hear it! Arghh! The top photo is a close up showing the ridiculous number of pedal changes in that passage. If Wagner was here right now I would (on behalf of all harpists) give him a serious talking to – and a book about appropriate writing for the harp.

I’m never quite sure of the best way to drive to Sheffield from Manchester, Snake Pass (twisty and turny and often shut) or M62/M1 (crazily long detour) – I went back the snakey way in the dark just to keep things interesting and to see how my new car handled it. I think he enjoyed it!

Alley hadn’t been given the music for one of the excerpts so we had to resort to modern technology:

All in all the concert went well – when the harps could be heard we pretty much doing what we were supposed to be doing, and with Wagner, maybe that’s all we could have hoped for.