Busy times for me! I've just taken over as editor of the Halesworth Festival Voices website and have loads of plans to build a site which is fun and useful for all of us in the choir - and which gives our friends and curious visitors lots of reasons to come to our concerts.
At the moment I'm working in Leeds, which means I'm missing out on my Monday evenings - and the concert is nearly upon us. I'm dying to start ripping apart and reassembling the website - but there is a more important and urgent task - fitting together the jigsaw which is our concert programme for 9th May. I have the choir member and orchestra details, and short biographies from what promise to be a quartet of truly excellent and international soloists. I then need to decide on the front cover picture (hard to look further than Tony's fantastic flyer, but I need to experiment and check it prints well in black and white - but who knows? I might go for something completely different) Then there are the words, translations and programme notes to fit in.
It is all rather fun - if you happen to be a masochist! I'm quite proud of some of my earlier efforts, and when I have sorted out a new organisation for the history of our concerts, I'll attach front cover pictures to bring back memories.
Working in Leeds reminds me of putting together the programme for our "Songs of the Sea" concert. When I was researching the programme notes, I became really fascinated as to the number of Sea-related works which had been composed for and premiered at the Leeds Festival - such as the Sea Symphony, the Stanford Songs of the Sea and his Songs of the Fleet amongst others. I couldn't understand why so many maritime works were especially written for an inland city. The reason is that the Leeds Festival always took place in October - around Trafalgar Day. But they didn't get to premiere Sea Pictures - Elgar wrote this for Norwich. Pity the Halesworth Arts Festival didn't exist at the time, or Sir Edward would no doubt have come to us to debut his new work instead!
So, first ever blog post nearly done. What can you expect in the future? Well. if I'm the blogger, you will generally get an excessive use of exclamation marks!!!!
But I'm hoping we'll share some fun and mutual interests, with lots of guest blogs from our members, friends and guests.
Jan
At the moment I'm working in Leeds, which means I'm missing out on my Monday evenings - and the concert is nearly upon us. I'm dying to start ripping apart and reassembling the website - but there is a more important and urgent task - fitting together the jigsaw which is our concert programme for 9th May. I have the choir member and orchestra details, and short biographies from what promise to be a quartet of truly excellent and international soloists. I then need to decide on the front cover picture (hard to look further than Tony's fantastic flyer, but I need to experiment and check it prints well in black and white - but who knows? I might go for something completely different) Then there are the words, translations and programme notes to fit in.
It is all rather fun - if you happen to be a masochist! I'm quite proud of some of my earlier efforts, and when I have sorted out a new organisation for the history of our concerts, I'll attach front cover pictures to bring back memories.
Working in Leeds reminds me of putting together the programme for our "Songs of the Sea" concert. When I was researching the programme notes, I became really fascinated as to the number of Sea-related works which had been composed for and premiered at the Leeds Festival - such as the Sea Symphony, the Stanford Songs of the Sea and his Songs of the Fleet amongst others. I couldn't understand why so many maritime works were especially written for an inland city. The reason is that the Leeds Festival always took place in October - around Trafalgar Day. But they didn't get to premiere Sea Pictures - Elgar wrote this for Norwich. Pity the Halesworth Arts Festival didn't exist at the time, or Sir Edward would no doubt have come to us to debut his new work instead!
So, first ever blog post nearly done. What can you expect in the future? Well. if I'm the blogger, you will generally get an excessive use of exclamation marks!!!!
But I'm hoping we'll share some fun and mutual interests, with lots of guest blogs from our members, friends and guests.
Jan