Tourism

There's a big push for local tourism with the waning of Covid in Australia but I'm not sure this can be called tourism.  Not sure it can even be called "on tour" because we just drove out for the day but it sounds cool.  Not that being on tour is such a comfy existence in the real world, but Musica da Camera's Sunday concert jaunt after each Saturday Cook concert is a pleasure.  And this was our 10th anniversary in Gunning; in the richly reverberant Shire Hall.  These out-of-town gigs are fun and, given it's a rehash of the program, they tends to be our best performances.  With Covid, the programs are shorter and we are doing two iterations in Canberra, so this was particularly satisfying as the third try.  Those missed repeats and poor counts and the like were fixed, and Rosemary took it slower and the works seemed to grow in intensity.  That surprised me.  So a pleasure it was.  The program was quite obscure, at least to me.  Rossini Viva Rossini was cute. Then Respighi Ancient arias and dances suite 3, the major ensemble work of the day, was somewhat odd and quite challenging.  Then Vivaldi Winter featuring a 15-yo violin powerhouse, a student of Rosemary, Fumiyo Yamamoto.  She also played the drastic dynamics of Sarasate Zigeunerweisen to finish up, with Alex Rowley Christmas suite for strings interspersed with its disguised carol quotes as a reminder that this unfortunate year of fires and hail and pandemics and Trump and more is coming to an end.  Good riddance.  But nice to do our little tour and to play with Fumiyo and just to neaten things up for this, the third and final iteration of this concert.  Until next year...

Musica da Camera performed Rossini, Reshigi, Vivaldi, Rowley and Sarasate under Rosemary Macphail (director) with soloist Fumiyo Yamamoto (violin) in two concerts at Cook and one in Gunning.

This is CJBlog post no. 2,300.