A very blessed Lunar New Year to all! May you be blessed with good health and have a fruitful year ahead of you!

It's been a while since I posted and so much has happened. First of all, I played with OMM at a wonderful concert featuring American repertoire. The concert went well and it was certainly one of the most rewarding concerts I've played. Partly because the parts are challenging, both technically and endurance wise. But we pulled it off quite successfully and a job well done to all OMM members for that! Here are some pictures.

On stage at rehearsal.

Happy faces after a tiring concert! All of us must have been feeling it on the face at this moment!

Next, I have started lessons with my new teacher, Damian Patti, who's a trombonist in the SSO. He brings lots of fresh new ideas to lessons and I'm glad to be learning under him. I do however, miss Fredi, especially his bass trombone playing because Damian doesn't play bass trombone and his knowledge of the bass trombone repertoire is not as in depth as Fredi's. Damian, however, does have a beautiful singing sound on the tenor and it has been inspiring me to produce such a sound. His exercises are also a bit more "mainstream" I'd say and some of them are still challenging so it's more stuff for me to improve on! I hope to have a good semester ahead with Damian and play a good recital at the end of it!

Finally, last week, I did a recording audition for the Pacific Music Festival (PMF). It isn't the first time I was sending a recording for an audition but the reprtoire they requested was pretty tiring! I basically had to play the entire Sachse Concertino, excerpts from Hungarian March, Haydn Creation, Hary Janos and Ein Heldenleben. The requirement is that I have to play the pieces in this sequence and it has to be in one take. This made the takes really tiring but I had lots of fun making the recording! I do not have very high hopes of getting the seat but I did this more for the goal-oriented practice for these excerpts to produce a good recording. My next audition will be for the Asian Youth Orchestra and that will be in 2 weeks time so one more audition to prepare for!

Alright, that's all for now. Goodnight world!