The Scokendians really are great musicians, people and, after spending some time with them I’m happy to say, friends. I realise that this has been a running theme through our blogs (and with good reason!) but I’m going to approach it from a bit of a different angle, so bear with me!
Being the youngest in the ensemble and having read the biographies of some of the other musicians (which I suggest you do, these people are incredible!) it was quite daunting to walk into our little rehearsal room and try to hold my own with the group. I came in late to our first rehearsal because of a different music course I had been at. Instead of looking into the room and seeing a group of big scary people there were 25 international musicians smiling back at me! This made it a lot easier to walk into that room, get out my oboe and play my best. It would have been easy for the rest of the ensemble to set me aside because I was ‘too young’, ‘wouldn’t understand’ or was ‘just a kid’ but they didn’t. No one of those phrases was used and they did in fact make me feel so at home that I’m contemplating never letting them leave Scotland, so thank you all!
So I suppose I should talk a bit about the music and the concerts! I feel like we had an really well planned programme, it was fun to pay, easy to listen to and generally just really enjoyable! We had a few more ‘classical’ concerts in concert halls in Glasgow and Aberdeen and they seem to have gone well because our audiences were quick to come and find us afterwards and tell us how much they had enjoyed the concerts!
We then had a few outdoor gigs, unfortunately the weather did not give us a warm welcome into Festival 2014 and our first outdoor concert at Glasgow Green was a bit damp and extremely cold, luckily we had a brave audience who were willing to stay through the weather to hear our programme!
The next day was indoors at Merchant Square where the audience were incredible and jumped at the opportunity to sing ‘Flower of Scotland’ as soon as we started playing it. Unplanned but very welcome audience participation!
Scokendia 