Trip to KW!

Yesterday I went to Kitchener to hear the Kitchener-Waterloo symphony play Symphonie Fantastique. The orchestra sounded great and Center in the Square is a really fun hall to go to– it has beautiful acoustics, seems to always be well-attended and also somehow cultivates the kind of community vibe that you feel walking into a summer show at Tanglewood or similar. Since NYO is training at Laurier this summer, it was nice to see the city of Kitchener-Waterloo as well.   Dinner before the show came from Imbibe,the  bar/restaurant beside the Conrad Center, and this morning was Matter of Taste, followed by brunch at Rise and Shine, a diner on the Waterloo side of the city divide. I briefly got to see the Laurier music building, from the outside, and am excited to hang out there this summer! I have actually been there before; in my last year of high school I visited the school and did a mock audition, which was an incredibly nice thing for the music school to do– give potential students the opportunity to see the school and practice auditioning there. I was even met and shown around by two bassoon students there. This was, in fact, the only school visit I did, and only because it was close. I was a somewhat negligent Gr. 12 student, in comparison with some of my friends who were doing university tours all over the country in the 11th and even 10th grades, and I actually never set foot in the McGill music building before my audition. In fact I didn’t end up going to the real Laurier audition, but it was fun to look around. It was good to hear the Berlioz live this weekend since I’ve even practicing the excerpts from it. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid having to learn Symphonie Fantastique properly until now, but I’m preparing for the Winnipeg Symphony second bassoon audition and the excerpts have finally caught up to me. The audition itself I’m not 100% sure about yet– it’s on June 30, which is a week after NYO starts but on a day which when I checked last was tentatively scheduled as a day off. It also means that I have exactly a month to prepare for this one, whereas for KW I had three months and definitely needed all of them. However, this time I have done one audition that I had a good experience at, and although there are more pieces listed for Winnipeg than KW there are bar numbers instead of whole movements given, which is nice. The other pieces on the program at KW last night were a Beethoven piano concerto– played by the boyfriend of a violist on the India trip, whaddaya know?– and an orchestral arrangement of Vivier’s Pulau Duwata_._