I’d like to take this oppurtunity to wish all my students and readers a Happy New Year.
Piano lessons resume this week from Wednesday (7th Jan), so those who have lessons on Mondays and Tuesdays will start again next week (12th an 13th Jan).
I have found a new email newsletter service provider and if you are not already subscribed then just put your email address in the box at the top left hand side of the blog or on the front page of my main website.
This year I have introduced a ‘piano points’ rewards policy to encourage practise. It will be explained at your next lesson or you can download a leaflet here or by clicking on the piano image.
Watch out for the next edition of the podcast, which will be published in the next couple of weeks.
Zookoda, the company who operate the free rss to email service which powers my newsletter, delivering it weekly to subscribers’ inboxes, has announced that they will no longer be able to run that service from 1st January, 2009. Unfortunately my newsletter will no longer be delivered every Saturday until I can find another service operator. I hope to be able to find one soon and transfer the current subscribers to the new service once it is up and running to reduce the amount of inconvenience to my readers.
Seasons greetings to all my students and podcast listeners. The Christmas episode of the piano gallery podcast takes a seasonal dip into the archives featuring:
Nikita - Jingle Bells
Lucy - Silent Night
both recordings from the 2006 Christmas Concert at Chester Cathedral and as a variation from solo piano fayre, my school choir; St. Clare’s, sing Follow That Star.
It’s now time to start thinking about competitions and music festival entries for 2009. I will be encouraging many of my students to take part as performance and competition are important ways of sharing as well as developing talent.
I am awaiting details of the Chester festival at the King’s School scheduled for 25th April next year though the Wirral Festival schedule (Friday 27th and Saturday 28th March, 2008) has been published well in advance.
The latest episode of the podcast includes recordings from the recent lunchtime piano concert which took place on 22nd November, 2008 at All Saint’s Church, Hoole.
The latest concert in the Ludus Cantiones series took place on Saturday at All Saint’s in front of a sizable audience.
The recordings have now been uploaded to the gallery and the best are scheduled to be included in the next piano gallery podcast, due to be broadcast in the next few days.
On a cold winter’s night that was so deep, over a hundred people gathered in the darkness of Chester Cathedral to be transported through four hundred years of music in reverence to the Virgin Mary. Whilst the time span was condensed for the duration of the concert which did not quite last four hundred years; the audience was treated to an hour and a half of music which was timeless.
The concert began in semi-darkness, permeated only by the glow of sixty six flickering candles and the plaintive sound of Jean Allain’s setting of Ave Maria sung by Becky Hay. A sequence of delightfully rhapsodic organ episodes followed, interspersed with plainsong floating ethereally from somewhere in the quire…
The Nave Choir will next be performing in concert on Saturday 14th March 2009 though this Christmas you can worship with them at the Nave Choir Carol Service on Sunday 21st December at 3:30pm.
This week’s podcast explores some of the repertoire for the ABRSM prep test, an intermediate stage which provides a goal in the first few months of playing prior to Grade 1.
