CD Countdown 2: Flying Pigs

6 DAYS TO GO!!

It’s up to me to continue the tale of Three Little Pigs… After such a side-splitting first encounter with actress and narrator Kenny, we knew that we just had to pig out on all the Roald Dahl we could. Fortunately as Royal Academy and Wigmore Hall Learning fellows at the time, we had the perfect opening to build on the project.

Enter Manorfield Primary school, a wonderful school in East London, with a truly fantastic music teacher Will Green, who took us on to develop a project with all of Year 5. We rocked up with Paul Patterson’s Three Little Pigs and 4 weeks later finished up with Year 5s very own composition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, another of Roald Dahl’s wonderfully wicked Revolting Rhymes.

Along the way we had some very interesting warm up faces….

Met some new piggy friends...

And most importantly of all had a really fantastic time working with a bunch of students brimming with ideas! The overall composition included a breakfast waltz, a march through the forest and plenty of squelching mud, all performed by Year 5 on a suitably gloriumtpious combination of instruments, violin, cello, trombone and percussion.

Very excitingly we got to take this entire project to the Wigmore Hall with Magnard Ensemble hogging the stage performing Three Little Pigs and year 5 performing the whole of Goldilocks and the Three Bears narrated by Kenny. It was so wonderful to see their excitement to be performing in a concert hall, not that we could really contain ours performing in Wigmore either!

My heart was melted by one student asking about the infamous green room, ‘Will our picture be up in there now?’. Sadly not quite just yet... but hopefully one day- DREAM BIG!!

Since then we’ve done a whole variety of education workshops from a music and movement workshop at Royal Opera House, to more composition workshops all over the country…

We’ve witnessed some dubious bassoon playing techniques… (blowing the house down)