Well we’ve had the world premiere and I think we all enjoyed it, orchestra and audience.

When we all arrived at 5pm for the run through, the BBC had already set up their equipment and were all ready to go.  Nina arrived and we went through the piece and she heard it in its entirety for the first time.  Now normally when you get comments on playing they are about making sure that you all play in time with each other.  How refreshing then for Nina to ask that the clarinets please try and not play together.  My fellow viola and I have had great difficulty with this concept, but it is great to get to decide where in the ‘bar’ you get to play. 

Very soon it seemed we had got to 7.10pm and we had rehearsed as much as we could.  The audience was starting to arrive and we had our visitors as well.  David was having a very busy weekend with the concert in Glasgow due the night after us.  Becca Laurence came from Sound and Music and Richard Shaw the Making Music Development Officer Scotland managed along too.  Unfortunately Evan Dawson from Making Music in London (who so kindly kept our original application and resubmitted it for this time) couldn’t be with us on the night. 

Before we knew it the concert was started.  We had Jupiter from the Planets and the Saint-Saens romance for violin (beautifully played by Ali Croal a pupil at Watson’s) and then it was THE piece.  We had the slides of our walks on the screen behind us as we played, quite a few of us had taken photos of the walks that Nina had asked us about and it gave us an extra feeling of connecting with the whole experience to have our own walks displayed behind us – that was the only drawback, we couldn’t see them. 

All too soon it was over, we had premiered our Book of walks (and enjoyed the experience), the audience applauded, Nina was presented with flowers and we were on to the next piece… 

In the interval we had a chance to get feedback from the audience and it was lovely to hear how well the piece had been received.  And to hear different views on the music; at rehearsals some had thought that it lacked emotion, but some in the audience hearing it found it very emotional and dark, especially in Industrial ghosts. 

 And what did the orchestra think in the end?  Well we are all really looking forward to hearing it on the radio; you certainly don’t get to hear what it sounds like as a whole when you are sitting in the middle of the orchestra concentrating hard on not playing with your partner.  Once we got over the initial shock of not playing conventional bars and techniques the whole experience was a positive one for the orchestra.  It made us think about our ideas of what ‘music’ is and what it means to us and it gave us a chance to use our instruments in ways that we would not normally encounter when playing.  It’s not every day that you get to work with a composer and have them write something especially for you and it’s an experience I certainly won’t forget. 

Thoughts from other members?

‘Well I enjoyed the challenge and I think we did Nina’s piece justice.  It will be very interesting to listen to the recorded concert and hear the piece as a whole – it’s hard to tell from within the orchestra what the overall sound is like. I particularly liked the Expanding Sky chapter – very atmospheric, especially near the end.’

  ’I thought it was really wonderful to work on Nina’s piece.  I particularly appreciated the fact that she took our favourite local walks as her starting point which gave the piece a very personal, immediate feel and a relevance to us all.  This, her enthusiastic commitment to the project and the end result made it a great experience.  I really enjoyed the challenge of following such unfamiliar-looking pages of music!  As a fairly new member of the orchestra, I was thrilled to be part of something so refreshingly modern – not my image of an amateur orchestra at all! (Not to dismiss all the other great composers whose work I have been enjoying playing too!)’

 ‘Although I was a bit unsure about the piece, to say the least, I came to view it with greater sympathy as the rehearsals continued.  I believe the composition came together at the performance and that the hard work of both Hector and the orchestra, required for such an unusual challenge, paid off.  I do hope that it will be broadcast and look forward to hearing it from the point of view of the audience, either on air or as a CD.’

 ‘I really enjoyed the challenge of playing Nina’s piece.’

When we initially applied for Adopt a composer we did it in order to celebrate the orchestra’s 80th birthday and unfortunately we weren’t successful that time.  We still managed to celebrate a birthday at the concert though!  After the interval a big banner mysteriously appeared at the back of the auditorium (I thought I knew everything that was happening that evening but I didn’t know about that).  It said ‘Happy 50th Lynda’ and I certainly wasn’t expecting that, or the singing of Happy Birthday that followed, but it was a lovely way to celebrate my birthday.  A world premiere and the audience singing me Happy Birthday, that’s a night I will always remember.