A festival, a premiere, an award

My annual pilgrimage to the KBB Music Festival was a little more exciting this year. Firstly, a new premiere!

Grammar Virtuosi, from Auckland Grammar School, commissioned me to write a new work for strings and percussion this year to mark the anniversary of when Grammar men went to the battle of Passchendaele in the first world war. It's called Foray.

"foray: a sudden attack or incursion into enemy territory"

It's been great popping along to some of their rehearsals and working with them on the piece, once such occasional pictured above. Huge thanks to their director, James Donaldson, and tutor, Boris Kipnis, for their tremendous support of the piece.

Secondly, a bonus performance!

St Cuthbert's College Concert Band and their wonderful director, Sally Tibbles, gave another performance of my piece, Bubble. I wrote this piece several years ago for the Bay of Plenty Music School and it's had several outings since then. It's a cool little piece and I am SO happy it got a performance by this group.

Thirdly, a gold award!

Let's start at the very beginning.

The Rangitoto College Concert Band is directed by the tremendous Beverley Brockelbank. Unfortunately she was away on tour with another school and was unable to conduct them, so I got the call.

Hold the truck! 'Déjà vu', I hear you say? Yes. Spot on. Earlier this year Bev was unable to take them to Hawaii, so I had that arduous(!) task. Reminisce with me here...

http://www.ryanyouens.com/2017/04/09/hawaii

So anyway, back to KBB. Bev and I worked together with the group in the lead up to the festival and then I took them through festival week.

They performed SO WELL. Like, completely blew my socks off. And they were awarded with a very shiny GOLD award. Hugely proud. Here are some pics:

Next year I may well be back to my committee duties of managing the website, online entries and honours programme, but I'll do my best to make it another extra exciting one.