May means Newbury Spring Festival time! I had a pretty packed fortnight of concerts, including the fantastic experience of performing Vaughan William's Sea Symphony with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It's a magnificent, stirring colossal slab of music - just a series of great moments, and the choir and orchestra really rose to the occasion in a packed final Festival concert. It's always great to sit in behind an orchestra as good as the BSO - just to take notes, and really listen and look. So many great composers of orchestral music became great through hearing a real orchestra playing up close on a regular basis. It's all too common these days to rely on the digital sounds of computer playback - getting better all the time, but no substitute for the real thing when it comes to learning the craft!
