Hello. I'm leaving for Malaysia later. I hope it'll be fun. But I guess the fun will be as much as I make it out to be that way right.

Anyway.

About SNYO concert.. It was 5th July. What can I say. Well I guess it was more or less a forgettable event. I mean. We didn't play as well as we wanted to, and it was quite worrying because we would bring that standard to Vienna. But thank god vienna was a completely different story. So the concert was just done, not many memories, plainly forgettable, yeah.

Then next the performance at Shangri La. It was pretty fun lah. I mean meeting everyone after the Vienna trip.. Played blue danube, dance of yao and radetsky if I don't recall wrong. Well. Good old Zhaohan forgot to bring Radetsky scores so me and Wenyi sacifriced ours for him and YiZhe and half faked through the piece. Dinner was frugal. Just some rice. The bean sprouts looked rotten, but all the same we gobled down the food. Then hanged around a bit talking, drinking orange crush I got from the reception area. Oh yes, and me YiZhe and WenYi and Ms Cheong got lost in a maze when we wanted to go from the ballroom where the performance would be to our waiting room! Were all joking Ms Cheong was a violist too. Well. About the performance it was nothing special. Everyone was busy eating and talking anyway. Not really listening, just like any normal dinner gig lah, nothing more to be expected. Remember the National JC choir singing too. Thought they were quite good, except the male soloist was a bit off, but he had great tone, seriously great.

And that's that.

Now. On to HCI Strings Concert. Oh man. It was great lah, another one of the best.

Well. It was on 8th August. So we arranged and managed to skip the lame N-day celebrations. Which was a huge blessing in disguise cos apparently my class screwed up its performance really badly I shall not include details as they are rather.. Embarrassing.

So yes woke up in the morning and started practicing my quartet scores. Was feeling a bit nervous then. So failed to coach juniors then who wanted to meet up with me in the morning for extra tuition. Then went to school at 11:30 for a bit of quartet rehearsal. Then it was time to leave. Everything was in a mess but in the end everyone got on the buses and left. Wai Peng (the birthday boy!! yes it was his b'day.) and some other people went to buy viola strings first before going.

Then we got Esplanade Rec Studio. There was a mix-up of drop-off points so walked over to the box-office to collect the other people who came later in the other bus. The bus I was on went into the cargo area and everyone could take the lift to Rec Stud easily. The others had to walk in through stage door through a long winding way through Esp backstage.

Oh I had lunch on the bus. Shared 2 macs EVMs with the quartet cos Calvin Wong was supposed to buy but apparently he didn't >=(

After managing to fit people into the rooms, Mr Chan came and we went for a rehearsal. It was then the quartet realised we hadn't practiced our mendelssohn quartet parts but oh well.

Ok. Then after that dinner.. Used the comps in the Green Room a bit. Then changed, rushed to Rec Stud entrance to pass tickets, then rushed back, just in time. Everyone was out already. So me and Lenard sort of made a grand entrance of our own. Haha.

Then realised I hadn't written bowings on the score for poor YiHan. So just rushed out a bit for the Mendelssohn 3rd movement.

The concert: Well. Let's just say everything went great, with the odd mistake of the violas here and there (esp. in Shosty 1st movement.). Yes. Mendelssohn was great, the quartet part went well even though we didn't practice it in the end. For the violin concerto we didn't really follow the conductor much, but I guess Alan covered all our asses with superb playing.

Intermission

We just started and ended the quartet movements, with Mr Chan looking on. Yeah. Then it was show time.

Dvorak:

Well. I'm really happy with our performance. And that's it really. I feel the 4 of us did everything we could to play this piece well and we pulled it off. With a few embarassing moments on my part, esp. the 1st movement where I got completely lost for 4bars. But that's about it. Really happy about it.

Then Bach. Well. It was ok. Shostakovich. It rocked. Seriously. Except the viola solo in the 1st movement which we screwed up pretty badly, but the 2nd movement covered up everything really. This is what we would have done at SYF.

Of course, Gustav's St Paul's Suite for an encore. Haha. Only 3 rehearsals, and we pulled it off. Really happy, really.

Yes. So that was it. I mean, I'm rushing like crazy. But what I really wanna say is I'm really proud about what we've done and it totally makes up for our loss at SYF. All the shame is gone now, we've shown what we're really worth.

Bye then. Hope I don't get screwed by some wild boar in Negara.