2011 - in words & pictures

18th of January

Well, my birthday came and went yesterday, and I am successfully a year older!

Today was the concert in conjunction with the wonderful Concordia Foundation where I was to play in the glorious suroundings of the Egyptian Hall, Mansion House in the City of London.

The event was the Lord Mayor's Banquet for the Aldermen of the City, and we (from Concordia - Nicky Spence, Laura Mitchell, James Cleverton, Satoko Fukuda, Phuong Nguyen, Ahmed Dickinson and I) were the after dinner music.

Such beautiful surroundings, such talented colleagues, and such a lovely, receptive audience! I am certain that I will enjoy travelling with quite a few of these people with Concordia and the Lord Mayor's delegation throughout the year...

19th and 26th of January

I recorded several Pearl Flute Promotional videos at Jonathan Myall Music to be used on their YouTube Channel. Here's the first one - you can find the rest of them on my Facebook Fan-page! Hope you Enjoy them!

12-14 February

I was delighted to spend some time this weekend with my Flute Playing hero, mentor and friend Sir James Galway. It's always such a pleasure and a privilege to spend time with Jimmy - we also had two great meals in Thai restaurant Patara - once on Saturday 12th for lunch with Composer/Conductor Dave Heath, and then again for an evening meal (pictured) on Sunday the 13th with flute-maker Emmanuel Arista, flautist Anna Stokes, and my lovely girlfriend (and also professional fluter) Abbie!

The next week consisted of a quick jaunt over to Lucerne to pick up a freshly spruced, and pampered flute from the Lohri shop, and then a reconnaissance trip to Shanghai with the Director of the Concordia Foundation, Gillian Humphreys - only four days worth of a trip in all - but we packed them full of activity, and got a small flavour of what lay ahead for us in April.......

March, April and the first third of May 2011

Right. Been busy. Slightly sorry to say - a bit too busy to write here even a fifteenth (yes, a FIFTEENTH) as often as I might've wished to - but when I seem to be averaging either a concert or a flute class every four days for nearly three months, I hope you'll forgive me for the lack of communication!

March started quietly, actually it started with a week in the Caribbean - on reflection not a good idea, as I found it very difficult to relax when I knew there was such a busy period ahead - maybe I should've put it off until the summer months, but I find it baffling that we in the UK insist on flying off to sunny climbs when the weather here is good, and endure our long, cold winters. Anyway, after the holiday, March exploded into activity with preparations for the China trip (see below) and various other Pearl Flutes related business.

On St Patrick's Day I made my now customary trip to the wonderful Restaurant Gordon Ramsay for (yet another) phenomenal meal with my lovely girlfriend Abbie, and then shot off to Middle Temple in the evening to play at an Ireland Funds GB event.

The following week (the 24th) brought me up North to Durham to do a flute day - where I got the lovely photos below (courtesy of Nick Unwin Photography)

March, April and May also saw me begin, edit and complete a set of ten pieces to go into the next set of woodwind books for Trinity Guildhall - look out for these when they are released later this year!

I'm now looking forward to a Recital in the Swiss Church next Friday, and a concert with the Bozza Ensemble the following week.

In other April/May news - my new composition for Flute Choir was released, and sold out within a week! It's already on its second print run! (saying this I only print in batched of 15 - but still - not bad going!)

You can read all about it and indeed, you can even purchase it: here

May-June 2011
After a reasonably sedate May - and the end of the Minchin gigs, June arrived, and the busy schedule hasn't let up since. June is averaging a gig of some sort - one every three days - it's great (if slightly exhausting) to be busy! I've just started depping in Lloyd-Webber's "Love Never Dies", where I play flute, piccolo, alto flute and (for three beats!) a Swanee Whistle! First time I've ever been depping in two West End shows at the same time - so as I write this - in the coming week, I'll be playing six shows - three of each....!

Yet again, I find the first show is always an adrenaline-filled experience, but hopefully once I've got another three under my belt - which will happen by Monday the 20th of June (I'm writing this on saturday the 11th) - things will feel slightly more comfortable and intuitive....

I had the pleasure of seeing Sir James Galway both in a concert at St Martin in the Fields on Monday the 30th of May, and the next day for lunch at his London base in SW1 - here we are pictured with my lovely new iPad 2 - Jimmy's got one too - but in black!

I'm also in the middle of writing arrangements for cello ensemble for an event at the end of the month - things are going well with this and I'm relishing the challenge!

July - August 2011
Another busy couple of months! July averaged two West End shows a week; had a video shoot for FLIGHT ensemble (watch this space for the results) various Pearl Flute events, and a wonderful week in Weggis at the Sir James Galway International Convention and Masterclass!

Sir James very kindly invited me to perform to the class on the Wednesday morning after the first session of the day, and I of course agreed! He asked me to play Ian Clarke's Zoom Tube - a personal favourite of mine, (see video below) and I think it certainly gave a new and different aspect of flute playing to this, most auspicious of flute events!

Highlights of the course were: Being invited to a fabulous champagne and dessert party at The Galway's house in Meggen - which culminated with about a dozen of us going for a lovely swim in their pool! Another was seeing Charlotte Bletton and Michael McHale play a wonderful concert - elegance, style, and technical perfection - all in one package - and they're even a romantic item! Perfect! Also, was great to meet the larger than life legend that is Jim Walker! A very special flute player and human being - my abiding memory will be of Jim striding alongside Jimmy & Jeanne's pool in Stars & Stripes swim shorts - glugging a very delicate Montrachet from the bottle. Rock. And. Roll.

Equally wonderful was the flute choir concert that finished the course off - a truly stupendous flute choir (as you'd hope) and throughout the course of the week I fell helplessly in love with the Eva Kingma Contrabass Flute that I played and fear I may have to part with a not inconsiderable amount of money in order that I may have it for myself....!

August started rather painfully as I got two armfuls of injections for a concert tour of Kenya which I'm doing at the beginning of September with the Concordia Foundation. This should be a fantastic experience - so watch this space for a report!

I have also been playing in the Heritage Orchestra in August - at a festival date in Oxfordshire. We were backing the ethereal, androgenous force of nature that is Antony and the Johnsons. Being mid-August, this should have been a warm and balmy summer's evening - but ended up being about 10 degrees celcius(!) - which is probably NOT warm enough to be playing outdoors especially when the whole orchestra is wearing white linen!

However - if the elements were cooling us, we were warmed by the reception of the crowd which was rapturous! Splendid!

As I write this - I am very looking forward to spending part of the coming week at the Flutewise Academy as a resident tutor, where the Academy inmates(!) will be doing many fun flutey things - including playing a special revamped version of The Flutewise Theme! I can't beleive it's a year old already!

September 2011

Well, the biggest news sof the month was a trip to Kenya with the Concordia Foundation for the Music for Life project - if you'd like to know more, you can download the programme from here. Too much went on in the ten days that I was there to tell you everything, but I wrote about ONE thing - our visits to Nairobi School - so you can see my slightly more in depth report on that below. But in addition there were workshop visits to the Korogocho Slum (pictures on facebook available to view here) work with AIDS orphans from the Kibera Slum, masterclasses at the Nairobi Conservatoire of Music, and three concerts - actually if you download the PDF programme - Valerie Kent says it all perfectly on page 5 of the PDF file.

Nairobi School Report:

Abbie and I were to go and present our fife project (along with 50 fifes) to Nairobi School. On the first morning we arrived, and were greeted by the smiling face of Mr Andrew Obaga – Head of Music for Nairobi School. This school, formally called the Prince of Wales School had all the hallmarks of old colonialism – columns and grandeur, though now all slightly world-beaten, and frayed around the edges. The edifice of the main building still loomed large and imposing – with the school motto emblazoned above the main entrance "TO THE UTTERMOST". With a slogan like this, we had great expectations!

We were brought in to meet the principal of the school in his office (this still brought back feelings of dread from my school-days!) and he welcomed us warmly and yet sincerely into his school – you could tell that this was a man who took his job as an educator very seriously. He asked what the Concordia Foundation was all about – and after telling him about all of the work that Concordia did, I added that "Simply put: your slogan is "To The Uttermost" and Concordia's slogan is "Building Bridges of Friendship through Music and the Arts". This seemed to please the Principal, and he sent us on our way to the Music Hut with blessings and thanks.

On arrival at the music hut ( tin roof, no glass in the windows) we were greeted by the best behaved group of 13-14 year old boys that I have ever come across – this was to be a constant at the school for the week. At these schools where entrance is gained through achievement, impeccable behaviour seems to be a given, and education is held up as the most important thing in a child's life. In nearly ten years of taking classes in schools and for music services in the UK, I have never had such attentive and polite children as the ones we worked with at Nairobi School.

We were there to teach fife – and this went exceptionally well – from scratch, the whole group of more than 50 boys were able to play in three part harmony from memory by the end of the week(!) But there were also some flute players at the school and we were able to give some help and pointers to the flute students in a separate class after the fife classes were finished. The instruments that they were using were on the whole, pretty dreadful - and mostly 20-30 years old and in a bad state of repair.

Due to the potential hazards generated by taking our own solid gold flutes out with us to do these classes and workshops, Abbie and I had been playing on borrowed student instruments made by Pearl Flutes – the company I am product specialist and artist-in-residence for – and so I appealed to the Pearl Europe management in The Netherlands and they agreed to donate one of the student instruments that we had been using to Nairobi School. Mr Obaga was thrilled, and again blessings on us and on the work of Concordia were free flowing! I am sure that this flute (which sells in the UK for around £500) will be put to excellent use, and I am looking forward to both hearing reports on progress, and hopefully seeing it for myself when I return at a later date!

In other news!

Our new Showreel for FLIGHT ensemble has just finished! I think it looks fantastic, and I hope you like it too! The video shoot was a long day, and a laboriuos task, but I think the end product justifies all the time, money and effort expended!

Please "like" it and add a (nice) comment! You can view the video on YouTube here

I also had a return trip to the Lord Mayor of London's residence Mansion House to play for the Variety Club's dinner. This was a very long evening (sound-check at 5pm for half an hour, then not playing a note until 10:15pm!) but the response to our "Latin Quarter" set was fantastic!