As a ‘thank you’ for all their hard work on the recent holiday courses the tutors treated our Young Leaders to a great night out!
(The following is written by our students)
‘We excitedly piled into tutor cars – all dressed up in our best clothes and set off for the Town Hall. We were off to hear our favourite orchestra the APO perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto conducted by Giordano Bellincampi. The soloist was internationally famous Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulan .
Before the concert began at 8pm we had a shared meal of pizza then fruit and yoghurt. We were lucky enough to have Ronan Tigue, Artistic Director of the orchestra, tell us a little about the exciting concert we were going to hear. Maestro Bellincampi even came to say hello.
One of our favourite things is seeing our own Sistema tutors performing. We saw Steven looking very smart behind his shiny timpani and Rebecca whizzing about the percussion section. Mark, Sue, Diane and Rachael were easy to spot in the strings and we watched them carefully.
The piece was quite hard to listen to because it was serious music. We listened in silence and watched in amazement as Isabelle’s bow and fingers flew over the strings. One thing we are very careful to do is not to clap between the movements but only clap at the end. When the end came we all clapped so loudly Isabelle came out onto the stage and played an encore!
It was a very late night driving back to Otara to meet our parents and tell them all about the evening– the tutors said that their cars were a lot quieter than on the trip to the concert.’