This morning the team visited Willetton Senior High School just outside Perth. The visit started with a concert to the year eight students that all the members of the team performed in. The pupils were introduced to the concert with a great warm up. LT led the first warm up item and got nearly 100 pupils singing an African version of “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes!”
The concert continued with an original arrangement of several folk tunes performed by 3 violins, guitar, cello and the amazing melodica!! Yellian, one of our two soloists from the Royal Over-Seas League, introduced the cello to the year 8s before playing Mark Summer’s Julio. This fiery piece was incredible and demonstrated some fantastically cool techniques. Our tuba soloist Les Neish finished the concert off with variations on a theme of the Carnival of Venice, accompanied by improvisations from 8 members of the team!
Following on from the concert, the team led several workshops and masterclasses with schoolchildren. Les and two of the young musicians took the brass players, 4 of the team including Pete and Yellian worked with string players, Nick Oliver and 3 pianists from the team took the pianists for a masterclass and Alison Cox with 6 composers from the team directed a composition workshop exploring the theme of ‘journeys’!
The morning has been fantastic and it was really interesting to see the leafy suburbs of Perth as well as meet up with some local young musicians and staff from one of Australia’s finest public schools
Perth 2011 