AYO String Quartet’s whirlwind tour of regional NSW took place in October, bringing AYO’s programs to a close for 2013. The quartet played for audiences in Uralla, Glen Innes, Coffs Harbour, and Tamworth, as well as participating in a range of workshops and tutorials for school groups in the area. Elena Phatak kept us up to date throughout the duration of the program, bookending the experience with a couple of fantastic blog posts (read them here and here). Here is a short excerpt from one:
‘The four of us agreed that working with schools and youth orchestras provided us with some of the most memorable moments of our trip. […] We put on about twelve concerts and workshops for many different schools and youth orchestras around regional New South Wales. […] In these concerts, we alternated playing excerpts from our repertoire with talking about our journey as musicians, explaining what it was like being involved in AYO, and interacting with the audience.
[…] The Residency program featured four public concerts – in Uralla, Glen Innes, Tamworth and Coffs Harbour. Each town and venue was as fascinating and quirky as the next, and we thoroughly enjoyed playing in all the venues, from the chapel converted into a cinema in Glen Innes, to the flour-mill-turned-beautiful-old-gallery in Uralla. In each venue, we had an hour-long sound check before each concert. We learned their importance quickly, as we had to adjust our sound and technique to best suit the acoustics of each of the different performance spaces, in a very short space of time. All of our concerts were well attended – either filled to capacity or the largest crowd the venue had attracted for a concert series – and we loved talking to our audience members post-concert, hearing about their own musical journeys, and their support and love of music in these regional towns.
[…] This experience has been humbling one; I have learnt so much about working and travelling in a chamber group, and how joyful bringing music to other people can be.’
