Young Grittleton: Revekka (14)

I would like to say a big thank you to the Joan Dickson Chamber Music Fund and ESTA for enabling me to attend Young Grittleton this year. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and learned a lot from the brilliant coaches and my fellow musicians. I love chamber music and it was so great, especially because of covid, to be able to play with people again. During the course I had the privilege of leading the orchestra which isn't something I'd done too much of before, so that was also a great learning experience for me. The main orchestral pieces were Perpetuum Mobile and Tico Tico No Fuba, which is a really fun Spanish piece. At the beginning of the week I got to try out lots of string quartets with other talented musicians. A few that I can remember include the Shostakovich string quartet No.7, which was one of the hardest to put together because of its irregular time signature and complicated rhythm. I also played the Beethoven quartet No.1, a Mozart quartet and loads more.

After we got a taste of those we were then assigned a piece for the remainder of the week. The four of us played the David Stone quartet No.2 and it was honestly such fun to learn and play. Being quite a contemporary piece we got to experience some unusual harmonies and interesting rhythms. We also had to focus a lot on the accents which really gave the piece its character.

Overall the course really helped to refresh my knowledge of chamber music and allowed me to make many new friends. Thank you again for letting me take part in such an enriching week of playing music.

Revekka (14)  -  violin