hampshire guitar orchestra newsletter

This is a web-archive of the Newsletter we emailed to our subscribers in September 2005

The passage of time may mean that some links to external sites are out of date or broken

ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

As always, this free newsletter is a small-scale plain-text production to keep you in touch with what's happening in hago - we always include links into our main website where you can read more, see photos and explore still further, so do click when you see a link!

HAPPY SPRING

Well, not all our readers are in the Northern Hemisphere, so while most of us look at the heavy morning dew and long shadows in the evening with a sense of disappointment that the cold weather is soon on its way, others are enjoying the warm days heralding the height of summer.

CONCERT NEWS

Bruce Paine
One such person is New Zealand Guitarist Bruce Paine, who returned to Auckland last Sunday. After his concert with us on July 7th, Bruce held a "House Concert" - a very popular event in New Zealand - for the hago players and a few guests - a chance to see Bruce up-close in the historic Waterloo Room in The Elms at Bedhampton. It was a chance for Derek Hasted our musical director to polish up his solo technique, as the second half was all duets.

Bruce then toured Belgium, France and Spain before returning as a special guest at The Birdman of Bognor.

For those unfamiliar with the event, the Birdman of Bognor combines serious man-powered flight (a prize of £25,000 for the person to fly 100 metres from a platform on Bognor Pier) with a find-raising element where people leap off the pier in fancy dress (quite often flightless birds, since you ask!) for charity. hago were invited to play in the VIP lounge for an hour before the second day's 2-hour flight window. Check out the photos at our Birdman of Bognor Gallery and see just how depressing the VIP lounge decor was! Enjoy one or two action shots from our vantage point on the pier.
Concert review
On 1st September we were delighted to uncover a review of the joint Bruce Paine and hago concert in Classical Guitar Magazine, the UK's largest magazine for people like us, and one of the world's most highly regarded.
You can read extracts on our Reviews pages

DIARY

The arrival of autumn sees us planning our future concerts again.
As always, the place to find the latest details is www.hago.org.uk/concerts/ , but here, to use that awful Americanism, is a heads-up on what is likely so far...
On November 12th we play the second half of a little concert at Petersfield, in aid of Cecily's fund. More details soon.
We have a provisional booking on December 10th for a Christmas concert in Cosham - a new venue for us - though we haven't quite slotted all the pieces into place yet.
On December 15th, we play a concert at Christchurch, Widley - another lovely Hampshire flint church - in aid of their own fund-raising efforts, and also in aid of the Rowans Hospice, a wonderful organisation for whom we continue to raise much-needed funds - do come along for a mix of music, both Christmassy and not-so, all presented with our usual enthusiasm and laughter.
On May 13th 2006 we return to Chichester and team up with WSGC and internationally acclaimed guitarist Amanda Cook for a repeat of the joint concert of 2004 that so delighted a massive audience. Hear our new repertoire and our new sound (see below!)

WEBSITE NEWS

A lull over the summer saw our MD replace his computer with a less elderly one. Everything is moved across, from the website to all our music scores, but to put into perspective the effort, it would have taken 35,000 floppy discs had we done it the hard way!
So the website is back in its regular cycle of updates again, and the page count has now exceeded 440.
As always, www.hago.org.uk/news/ takes you to the newly added pages.
Why such a large site? Well, we like to think hago is pretty much unique and so we're turning the site into a living history where all our old concert venues and photos, playlists and soundclips are stored.

RECRUITMENT NEWS

We welcome two new players to hago when we reconvene later this month. We'll have group photos in due course, but right now our new players - both Grade 6 - will give us a much improved volume and focus in the centre of our soundscape, as you'll hear when you come to our next concert.

GUITAR NEWS

We have a third alto on order - just a second-hand one that we will take to concerts in the unlikely event that we have a broken string. Players amongst you will know that nylon guitar strings are amazingly unstable when they are first fitted. Well, the alto guitars (see www.hago.org.uk/guitars/alto) are considerably more temperamental, and even a month after new strings are fitted, the top string (which is almost at breaking point, being a lot thinner than a guitar top string), requires tuning daily. And not just a minor correction, it goes noticeably flat in 24 hours.
For this reason, a broken string in concert would be the end of that alto for the evening. And so, we have a "spare" coming along, being hand-carried from New Zealand by someone travelling first class (how the other half live!)

FOR OVERSEAS VISITORS

English Eccentricity is something we're world famous for - do visit our Birdman pages and enjoy something even more eccentric than usual!

hago newsletter 2nd September 2005