Fireside Favourites

Fireside Favourites is the name given to the mid-year concert series for 2013, staged by the Sinfonia of the Mid North Coast. There were concerts at Forster, Wingham and Port Macquarie, including two children's concerts.

http://www.sinfoniamnc.com/

David joined this orchestra as trombonist shortly after we arrived in the area. It is a community orchestra drawing musicians from as far north as Kempsey and as far south as Smith's Lake. They perform two concert series annually, conducted by the inspiring James Hannah and the aspiring Iain Pole. The most senior member is a 90 year old violinist and the youngest, a 12 year old doing great work on percussion. It is the most wonderful thing, this orchestra and the concerts are amazingly good and thoroughly enjoyable. Of course, it's not the Boston Philharmonic, but they do attempt difficult pieces and the music is varied and challenging, with great sound for the most part. Hard to pick my favourite piece this year, but I think it was the excerpt from the Liang Zhu Violin Concerto by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, played with such haunting delicacy by this year's young Sinfonia scholarship winner, Ciara Halan. There were classical, traditional and modern pieces. Fifty musicians on stage. Wildly applauded.

The baton is raised for the opener, the overture to the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai. The program included Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Grainger,  Pascual Narro, Lloyd Webber, Maurice Jarre and even a rollicking rendition of the symphonic suite from Pirates of The Caribbean.

(Above) Tenor John Thompson and soprano Miriam Lattimore sing Con te Partiro by Francesco Sartori.

The top of David's head was all I could see while he played the euphonium part in Wagner's Grand March from the opera Tannhauser. The sound was lovely, mellow and full above the rest of the brass.

The audience gave a standing ovation.

Lovely sunset on the drive home

(Above) Lake Wallis, looking south west. We have just passed the winter solstice and the weather is actually relatively cold. No frosts so far, but the seas have been big. This new metre-high sand cliff (below) is the result of pounding waves on our local, Diamond Beach. Those grasses kept the dunes from being completely swept away. The sand will come back though.

(Below) I actually had to get out my big Melbourne coat for this occasion, a meeting of the Hallidays Point Garden Club, in a garden at Bohnock. We have agreed to host the August meeting and apparently it will be interesting for members to visit a "before" stage garden rather than the established ones they usually see. About 30 people usually turn up. They recently had an "Open Garden" day with 9 local gardens (while we were in Canberra for Mae's wedding) and raised around $14,000 for the Riding for the Disabled place on Lakes Way. By joining, we're hoping to glean lots of local knowledge. But we remain unconvinced about the common practice around here of planting into silly little mounds. None of these mounds appear big enough to make any difference to drainage, but we may be proved wrong over time. When our non-mounded plants drown...