Drumming on TV, Amati Orchestra, Steve Gadd & London Philharmonic Orchestra
I was involved with some filming this week with a couple of BBC celebrities, playing for a TV show which should air this Saturday night.. I'll follow up on it after it has aired so as not to ruin any surprises. I've also been enjoying playing timpani with an orchestra I joined a couple of months ago, the Amati Orchestra. The orchestra's mission statement is to become "the finest ‘non-professional symphony orchestra in the UK" and we featured in BBC Music's Get Playing programme a couple of weeks ago and in a TripTide article last week:
We're tackling some great music just now - Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony, Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor Overture.
I also saw a couple of great concerts over the last few days - firstly one of my drum heroes Steve Gadd at Ronnie Scott's (went all out, paid for priority seats, ordered food and everything!!), and then the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall who had a great programme including Shostakovich's 5th symphony.
Tomorrow I'll start working on Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which I'm playing on Friday and Saturday in an opera production (Normansfield Theatre, 7:30pm for anybody interested.. tickets are £20). Thinking about it, I'll miss the TV show appearance I mentioned at the start of this blog - that's probably a good thing, hope the drumming was ok!