NZ Day 1 (by Matt Knight)
We celebrated Easter Sunday with the first rehearsal of our New Zealand tour, at the Centre of Musical Arts in Nelson. To be honest it was a bit of relief to feel slightly human again, and for our lips to have returned to a more normally responsive state. Brass instruments are fairly unique in that it is actually a part of the body that is responsible for making the sound. And it turns out that flesh and blood don’t necessarily respond well to over 30 hours in an aeroplane. So when we forced ourselves to have an individual practice session shortly after our arrival from the UK on Saturday, the results were for the most part less than optimal.
We had set off from Heathrow on Thursday lunchtime. Huw had already clocked up a few hours in the air, having flown straight in from New York, but the rest of us were fresh – full of excitement for our first tour of 2019, taking us further from home than we had ever been before.
2 flights, about 27 hours and next to no sleep later we arrived in Auckland, and since morale had sunk to just slightly above total despair we decided to buoy our spirits with the best gourmet breakfast that the airport had to offer. Almost totally rejuvenated by our Bacon and Egg McMuffins, we boarded the small plane to Nelson.
As the short final flight progressed the sun came up over New Zealand, giving us our first glimpse of this stunning country.
Touching down early on Saturday morning, we dropped our many suitcases at the hotel and made our way out for a slightly more nutritious brunch at the local market.
As the time difference from the UK is 11 hours, we were wary of succumbing to jet lag, and decided that the best course of action was to spend the afternoon doing something energetic. The weather was fine and the scenery spectacular, so we opted to hire some bikes and cycle around the city and surrounding countryside, occasionally stopping to sample some of the craft beers and wines for which the region is renowned.
40 km later, and a little saddle-sore, we returned to the centre of Nelson for an early evening meal. By this stage fatigue was almost incapacitating some of the members. The normally lively conversation was sometimes reduced to a series of unintelligible grunts and yawns, and when we had finished eating it became clear that even though it was only 8pm resistance to sleep would soon be futile. We retired for what felt like a well-earned rest.
Septura tours are normally pretty intense, with very little time off, and so it felt strange to wake up on Sunday and have a morning entirely at leisure. We regrouped around lunchtime, and amidst torrential rain showers made our way to the Centre of Musical Arts for our rehearsal. The majority of the time was spent re-familiarising ourselves with our arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, slightly revised since we debuted it almost a year ago. We’ll be performing this in our Pilfered Piano programme, which features at 3 of our concerts in New Zealand.
Work completed for the day, we headed out for an Easter meal. Nelson was not at its most lively on Easter Sunday evening, but we found an accommodating hostelry, and then got an early night in preparation for our residency here, a jam-packed few days starting tomorrow.
