Thursday 12th February - Day 4

So the final day before the performance is over and I'm pretty happy with where we're at! Firstly a massive thanks to Sandy for doing all the arranging - he's worked so hard to produce two 10 minute pieces and all the individual parts it's incredible!

This morning Sandy and I were faced with the challenge of what to do when we found the library was shut, so we started trying to work out who was playing which trumpet in all of the sections of the piece! A table with instruments and pieces was the easiest way to start this so we got cracking to organise ourselves and make the parts quicker to sort out on Sibelius.

At 12 we had the much-awaited masterclass with Gabor Tarkovi, principal trumpet of the Berlin Philharmonic and what a fantastic experience this was! The 3rd and 4th years each played a few excerpts and Gabor worked on them with each person, giving really good advice on style, articulation and production. In particular there was a recurring theme of not making notes too short so the excerpt has a fitting style and sounds well amongst an orchestra. Gabor is an absolutely incredible player and was such a great person to have a masterclass with!

Andy working on excerpts with Gabor.

We all returned to room 222 afterwards chatting about the masterclass and we had to fill in Sandy, who had been hard at work finishing off our arrangements and printing parts! The remainder of the afternoon was then spent rehearsing the pieces and thinking about how we were planning to set up our ensemble and all the equipment the following day for our performance. We also came up with a wet weather plan - wear waterproofs!

Definitely looking forward to tomorrow for our performance but also quite apprehensive as this will be our opportunity to show everyone what we've been doing all week...