Festival this year with a new group was really exciting, a lot of fun, and a lot of hark work. I would attribute everybody's individual hard work and our strong team work ethic to our success this year. Festival is always a fantastic experience, and I'm really happy that we did as well as we did. Moving on to our specific pieces, I would say that in my personal opinion, The Faraway Place was my favorite piece to play, even though it did not go as well as during our rehearsals. We had some out of tune notes from all of the sections especially up on the higher strings. Our confidence as we played seemed to waver in various places, but we were able to all come back together for a nice and solid finish. This is a really beautiful piece, and I really like dour interpretation of it, because it flowed very nicely and had a very deep, mellow sound. I would say that our tempo was verging on a little too slow, because some notes started to blur together giving us a slightly muddy sound in some areas. Overall, not our best piece, but not bad at all. Rondo Energico sounded true to its name, as a very vibrant and energetic piece. Our beginning was slightly weak, but as what seems to be a reoccurring theme, our confidence builds throughout the piece leading up to a strong finish. We had an excellent interpretation of this piece, with a very nice clear and sharp sound overall. We had a great dynamic contrast, with the fortissimos ringing out clear and sharp, and distinctly different from the piano sections. From where we started ( and practiced for 63 minutes), our pizzicato was together most of the time and sounded very nice and clear. As always, there are a few things to improve on but overall an excellent performance. Bells was certainly our best piece, as agreed on by most of our class and the judges. We started out very strong, and maintained that strength and aggressiveness throughout the entire piece, leading to a rich tone and clear sound. We fell apart at a couple of parts, but recovered very quickly. This piece had beautiful dynamic contrast, and was very together overall as an ensemble. Overall, we did an excellent job with strong dynamics and rhythm. This performance was very high quality, but could be improved with attention to tone and style throughout the whole orchestra.
