And I thought Americans tended to be overly patriotic

Sarah, Will and I went to Royal Albert Hall after photo class today to see the Classical Spectacular. To quote Linda Harkness, our amazing SULP student services faculty member who promoted the event to us,

"It’s a total musical extravaganza, a candy box selection of the world’s best loved classics (even the non music lovers among you will probably know most of them). But what makes it a ‘spectacular’ is that the show is accompanied by lasers, lights, can-can dancers and even canon fire in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s wonderful 1812 Overture, with uniformed Napoleonic soldiers standing guard around the area. There will be flag waving and cheering, so it would be fair to say it’s not an evening for classical music purists."

That describes the event remarkably well. The 1812 Overture was pretty sweet, and it's the first time I've seen a live performance of it. And they played Gustav Holst's Mars! Gahhh!

But then they played some uniquely British songs that I wasn't familiar with, and the entire audience waved their little British flags around.

The event was indeed a bit tacky.
Will stands in my way for the duration of the concert.

More Business Story

I found a sweet company for my business story, Howarth, which specializes in woodwind instruments. I usually struggle at communicating with complete strangers, but as I have a bit of woodwind history of my own, I could at least talk to them about something. The people working there were so nice and allowed me to walk around and take pictures of their daily operations.