Lost & Found #32: Orchestra Wellington Circus Proms, 2007 & 2009
Orchestra Wellington Circus Proms 2007
I was Orchestra Wellington's photographer from 2004-2011, documenting concerts and rehearsals for them with a range of guest soloists alongside music director Marc Taddei, a marvellous conductor, and a hilarious guy to work with, too.
In 2007, General Manager Christine Pearce got in touch to say they were working with a circus school on a kids' concert, and would I like to photograph it for them - naturally I was intrigued, but I'm not sure I expected THIS! Sure, why wouldn't you put hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of delicate instruments on stage with a flying trapeze, kids on unicycles, and stilt-walkers? What could possibly go wrong...?
Well, nothing did (though a unicycle did get quite close to me during rehearsal) - but it was a heck of a show, and sold out the Michael Fowler Centre at least once.
So naturally, we did it again - and in 2009, I decided to take a bit of a chance and set up a second camera behind the stage, which I could trigger wirelessly as I worked from my usual positions in front of the stage. (The risk was simply that something might not work, and I wouldn't know until after the show - you can test these things as much as you like, but when the venue is full of people, the radio signals don't always work the same way as they did when it was empty...)
Fortunately, everything worked perfectly as planned - and I was able to be in two places at once, which is a bonus! (Of course there are many more photos from the events, but originally this series of Lost & Found blog posts was just going to be single photographs - and now I've stretched it to a dozen or more, already!)
Take a well deserved bow - just for surviving - Maestro Taddei!
Marc Taddei & Orchestra Wellington, 2009