Music, Orchestral Gigs

Harrogate Harpist

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Angelina in the car before setting off for Harrogate

A few weeks ago I played for The National Festival Orchestra for their concert in Harrogate. I’ve performed with this orchestra for many years and it’s always lovely to be invited back for another concert.

a photo of Angelina's harp at St. Wilfred's Church, Harrogate

We were accompanying Harrogate Choral Society and the programme was very varied indeed.

The Playlist

Eric Whitacre – Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine

Vivaldi – Four Seasons

Cecilia McDowall – Da Vinci Requiem

The only piece with a harp part was the McDowall, in the second half of the concert. I decided to sit in and watch the first half and the pre-concert talk with Cecilia herself. The Whitacre was a really interesting piece that I hadn’t heard before. I love when a choir uses their voices in unusual ways that the audience isn’t expecting. The violin soloist for the Vivaldi was fantastic, her name is Sara Trickey and if you get a chance to see her, definitely go.

The McDowall is one of those great pieces where the parts aren’t particularly difficult, but they are very effective and every part comes across. The harp is an easy instrument to cover up completely if too much is going on. Not in this piece. I got some lovely feedback that the harp came across really well, and that is a real compliment to the skill of the composer.

The Day as a Harrogate harpist

I was needed for the first half of the rehearsal, and the second half of the concert. This meant I had a long break in between, in which to amuse myself as a Harrogate harpist around town. I was planning to go on an epic walk as I’m trying to get my steps in at the moment. However, it was pouring with rain pretty much all day, as well as being really cold for this time of year. Despite the rain I spent an hour wandering around the beautiful Valley Gardens in Harrogate.

a photo of a fountain in the middle of a pond at Valley Gardens, Harrogate

All in all, it was a lovely day and a successful concert. I love a 7pm concert start as it means I get home to my husband and baby a little bit earlier.

If you’d like to enquire about hiring me for your wedding or special occasion, click here to send me an enquiry.

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Music, Special Occasions

Birdsall House – Harp Music for a special occasion

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Earlier this month I played for a very special occasion at Birdsall House, near Malton.

A photo of Birdsall House, near Malton

It was the hundredth birthday of a lady called Hermione, who grew up in this beautiful home. Together with some of her family members, we came up with a playlist that we hoped she would enjoy.

Harpist Angelina playing the harp for Hermione on her 100th birthday

I love when my clients want to pay special attention to the playlist. It makes the event much more personal and meaningful. It also gives me the peace of mind that I am giving my clients exactly what they want.

The Playlist

The requests were as follows:

  • classical pieces, but nothing too cliché
  • plenty of folk music
  • nostalgic songs from the World War 2 era

I am classically trained so I have plenty of classical music in my repertoire. I use forscore on my iPad to create playlists for each event that I play for. So I put in most of my classical repertoire, taking out Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Greensleeves, and anything else I deemed ‘overplayed’.

For the folk music section, I added in Scottish folk tunes Fairy Lullaby, Loch Lomond and O’er the Sea to Skye, a Welsh folk song called Watching the Wheat, and from Ireland I decided to include Londonderry Air.

When it comes to the World War 2 nostalgia, I decided on A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, The White Cliffs of Dover, and We’ll Gather Lilacs. These songs remind me of my childhood, my father would play the piano at parties while my sister sang these songs. Such happy early musical memories.

On the day

So with the playlist finalised, I headed over to Birdsall House with my harp. It’s worth mentioning that this was my first engagement since having my baby, so to be honest I was a little nervous! I hoped I would cope with lifting and moving the harp ok post-caesarean, and I hoped I would still have the stamina to play for long periods of time. I hadn’t done my usual amount of practice while looking after my newborn baby.

A photo of a harp behind a table laid for lunch at Birdsall House

Luckily, everything went really well and I received lovely feedback regarding my contribution to the festivities. I felt so welcome, the food and conversation were both excellent. I had a ‘harpy’ version of Happy Birthday up my sleeve, and then it was time to head home.

All in all, a fabulous gig and a fabulous day at Birdsall House.

Here is a lovely review following the party:

A google review of Harpist Angelina. Angelina came to play during my mother's 100th birthday party which was a lunch for 30. Angelina was a pleasure to deal with from start to finish.

If you’d like harp music for your Wedding or special occasion, click here to fill in my contact form. You can find information about packages and prices here.

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Lifestyle, Music

2019 Goals – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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Hello and a belated Happy New Year. How was your first week of 2019?

The House.

As I’m writing this, a plumber is replacing our boiler, which of course packed in just days after Tim and I moved in to the new house.

So it’s been a cold few days for us.

Nevertheless, it’s taught me to be very grateful for our usual way of life – have you ever thought about just how amazing it is to have hot water on tap? How wonderful it is that our houses heat themselves automatically? How blissful it is to have a hot shower and dry yourself with a warm, dry towel?

I’m feeling very grateful for these little things today.

This is a time I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. Tim and I are in the house, and things are finally starting to settle down into a rhythm. The only things missing right now are a washing machine (lost by the removals company *sob*) and internet (being installed on Friday *yay!*).

Life.

My plan going forward is to put these blogs up on Mondays, but as you can tell, this week’s is a little late due to not having sufficient internet/spending all my time doing laundry at my parents’/trying to stay warm in the freezing-cold house.

Last year I feel like I made a lot of progress with procrastinating less, achieving most of what I set out to do and generally staying a bit more organised. In 2019 I want to continue all of that, but I want the increased productivity to result in more income, please. It sounds shallow, but my goal is to make more than I spend. I don’t want or need loads, just enough to pay the bills and have a bit left over for a rainy day/doing up the house/getting married.

I’ve signed up for some extra work online – teaching English to Chinese children – which is actually really fun and will hopefully tide me over while I find work as a harpist and harp teacher in York. I’m very grateful to a friend of mine for recommending this to me – you know who you are – thank you babe.

My piano will be brought over from Congleton in the next week or so, at which point I can start giving piano lessons in York too – hurray! I am also starting to give harp lessons online (when I have internet) so that is a super-exciting new venture.

Health.

Another 2019 goal of mine is to prioritise my physical and mental health, I’ve gone back to the beginning with my running and starting to work my way through the Couch 2 5k app, I’ll be practising yoga and meditation regularly and trying to eat as well as I can – nothing too strict but my long-term goal is to have a good, healthy quality of life for as many years as I can. Of course, once our garage gym is all set up, Tim and I can do our strength training in there as well.

This may be the subject of another blog post (let me know if you’d like to hear more on this), but the life of a freelancer can be a little chaotic (just a little), with late nights, early mornings, disrupted meal times etc., so keeping our bodies on a schedule when it comes to eating and sleeping really helps our bodies and our health. So, as I’m reading The Circadian Code by Dr. Satchin Panda at the moment, I’m trying to stick to a regular eating/sleeping/waking up schedule to see if that results in an increased amount of energy. Fingers crossed.

So, that’s probably enough from me for now. I really hope you are well (and warm) wherever you are. Check back next week for another post.

Chat soon,
A x
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Career, Places

Countdown to Christmas – 3 weeks to go

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Well this feels retro, I’m writing this in the break between a rehearsal and an evening concert. I’m sitting in the cafe of Leeds College of Music, having rehearsed with the Wind Orchestra before their concert tonight. We are playing an arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (amongst other pieces that don’t require a harp). Here’s a photo of the pitched percussion section – harp, piano, celeste.

harpist in York
harp, piano, celeste

This weekend has been exceedingly busy, it began on Friday and finishes on Tuesday evening. Today (Monday 3rd) me and the harp are in Leeds, we were in Sheffield last Saturday and then there’s a CLOUDS meet-up tomorrow. Do you like how I’m including Monday and Tuesday in the weekend? Wednesday I will chill. All day. Burning the candle at both ends can only be sustained for so long.
Things actually calm down a bit from then on, which is unusual for December but not surprising as most of my teaching has now drawn to a close ready for the big move to York. Speaking of which, I’m still clinging on to the hope that we’ll be in our new house by Christmas, we just need to sign contracts and complete. Keep everything crossed. Our journey to a home of our own has been 18 months in the making and I cannot tell you how excited I am to get a bit more settled. Congleton is so lovely but the amount of driving Tim and I are both doing is crazy.
December is a great time to think about the year ahead and start planning and getting organised. What are your goals for 2019 – musical or otherwise? One of my goals will be to keep on schedule with my social media. That means weekly blog posts – pop your email in the box if you’d like to join my little crew (what shall we call ourselves?) and receive these posts into your inbox. It also means weekly videos on my YouTube channel, which you can subscribe to here.
The current plan with the videos is to alternate between a performance video and more of a vlog/life update video. I really enjoy making these and I hope you enjoy seeing a little snippet of what’s going on over here, any feedback is always appreciated.
In the meantime, from the new year I will be scouting out work over in Yorkshire so please do use my contact form to get in touch if you need a harpist in York for music lessons, or for background music for your wedding or social event. You can also email me – angelinawarburton@gmail.com.
As always, thanks so much for reading, here are my social media links if you want to follow me or say hi.
See you next week!
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Career, Music

Moving to York

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated you here on the blog, and as you can see from the title of this post, I have some big news…

Tim and I have been house-hunting since we got engaged in May 2017. However, it was only recently that I started to feel the call to move closer to home. York will always be special to me, it’s where I grew up and went to school until the age of 16. The thought of moving back to York makes me so happy and excited for the future. Tim is going to move his busy Personal Training and Sports Massage business over to York too, so our home is going to be a hub of activity!

So, we started looking in York and found somewhere we like in the Foxwood area, made an offer and it was accepted – hurray! Our solicitors are currently crunching through all the searches and finer details but the crux of the matter is, hopefully we’ll be in our new home by Christmas. Everyone keep your fingers and toes crossed.

This means it’s time to put my Yorkshire feelers out. If you live in York and are interested in having harp lessons, piano lessons, or music theory lessons, please do get in touch. I plan to start teaching in York as soon as possible after the new year, and I would love to help you reach your musical goals.

In the meantime, I do offer lessons via skype, so if you live in York and want to start right away, maybe we can start online and then move to offline lessons when 2019 comes around.

I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to going back to my Yorkshire roots.

As always, here are the ways in which you can contact me should you so desire:

https://twitter.com/harpistangelina

https://www.facebook.com/angelinawarburtonharpist/

https://www.instagram.com/angelinawarburton/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQzzApriMcGEdE1ZxjkWMdg

I also have a Patreon page if you are interested in supporting me in that way:

https://www.patreon.com/harpistangelina

Thanks so much for reading, let’s chat soon,

A x

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Career, Lifestyle, Music

Alderley Edge, Prestwich, and the 10k that didn’t happen.

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I’m writing this week’s post in a Caffe Nero in Alderley Edge. I’m here to play with Alderley Edge Orchestra for a concert tonight, we are performing Holst’s The Planets and Elinor Nicholson and I are the harp section. 

We arrived early to get good parking spots (harp life), warmed up, and are now both catching up on some admin over cups of tea/coffee.

How’s everyone coping with the Beast from the East? Where I am in south Manchester it hasn’t been too bad, and I’m thrilled that I haven’t lost out on any work due to snow. It can be super frustrating when snow means cancelled gigs, which means no payment, not ideal.

The 10k race that I’ve been training for however, that has had to be cancelled. I can totally see why the organisers took the decision as lots of people were no doubt travelling from a good distance away. It’s a bit gutting to have trained in snow, wind, hail and freezing cold to end up not doing the race, but training is never wasted is it? I’m still fitter and stronger than before and that was the whole idea of competing. I’d decided to treat myself to some new gear after the race, so when I heard that it was cancelled I went ahead and ordered them anyway, maybe I’ll chat about them in the next post. Totally off-brand but exciting anyway…

On the house front, I do have exciting news, a house that we viewed back in January has finally accepted our offer! Hurray! The house is in Prestwich – north Manchester – and I’m keeping everything crossed that this time everything goes smoothly. This is the third house we’ve had an offer accepted on so hopefully it’ll be a case of third time lucky… I’m simply far too excited about actually having a music room/office, and I know Tim is looking forward to having his own gym in the garage.

Could this be the new music room??

I wasn’t expecting buying a house to take this long and we’ve certainly learned a lot along the way. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve finally found our home.

I think that’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading as ever, and if you’d like these posts to go straight to your inbox, just pop your email address in the box at the top of the page. I’d love to connect with you that way. These posts sometimes get sent out a day or two early to my email list – so if you fancy that then do sign up.

As always, you can follow me on Patreon, Instagram, Twitter & Facebook to keep up with harpy and other shenanigans.

Ax

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