Harrow Suzuki Group

The final Harrow Suzuki school concert was this morning which means that now all of my school year things are finished with. The little ones all wore fancy dress (costumes) and looked adorable. (I'm hoping that one of the group photographs will wend its way to me!) My favourites were the two boys who had substantial plastic helmets as part of their attire, because how do you play the violin with a helmet on??

The younger group sang a princess song with lots of actions and a pirate song with lots of jumping. They were excellent. We've been practicing them a capella because I'm not so great with the piano, but the pianist who was accompanying the violin portions of the concert decided to help us out as well. That was great except that at the beginning of the first song we turned out to have begun in two completely different keys. It took a minute for us all to work that one out and start again. Oops! Embarrassing! Fortunately Suzuki parents (or at the very least THIS group of Suzuki parents) are the nicest people ever so they just chuckled and we carried on.

The older group did a rhythmic vocal warm up that they had written new words for, a dancing song with actions and “ai-yi-yi”-ing, and pease pudding hot in 4ths. Thank goodness for the piano in the pease pudding song; we always get there in the end, but this time they were able to sing the 4ths straight away. A relief since this was, after all, the concert. Phew.

I have a great fondness for any number of these students. They're clever and focused (more or less) and nearly all of them are hilarious goofballs. One of the girls was sat directly in my sight line during the violin pieces and for one song proceeded to follow the line of the music with her face. Does that make any sense? She was squinching her face all up and then popping her eyebrows up to her hairline following the melody that the violins were playing. Now, if I were a responsible adult I probably would have silently shook my head to get her to stop. But I'm not. So I joined in. (And hoped it wasn't *too* obvious!) After the concert her mother laughingly asked what the pair of us monkeys had been doing. (Tum ti tum....nothing, geeze)

I'm keeping this group until I leave because I love them so much.