McGlashan Trio win Dunedin round of the NZCT Chamber Music Contest

Tuesday 16th June 2015

Recently Luke Nie, Jack Grey and Boen Deng participated in the district rounds of the New Zealand Community Trust Chamber Music Contest. 


The McGlashan Trio performs at the Chamber Music New Zealand Competition
The McGlashan Trio performs at the Chamber Music New Zealand Competition

We managed to pull through for a win and an automatic entry to the regional rounds in Christchurch, where we will be performing on Saturday.

It all started when our teachers decided that we would make a good group for the annual Chamber Music competition. We started getting together at lunchtimes and at my house after school to practice. Unfortunately, retaining full concentration for an hour when you’re attempting to improve the same piece by playing it over and over again is extremely difficult, and our practice sessions would inevitably descend into Luke attempting to steal my Pokémon cards and Jack getting angry at him.

About three weeks before the competition, we realised that we only had three weeks of practice left. We started panicking and decided that we needed to actually practice seriously. Slowly, after hours of both individual and joint practice, our piece started to achieve some resemblance of quality. We also had to prepare things like clothing and the performance introduction, which we attempted to completely ignore but were ultimately unable to.

After a practice performance on Tuesday the 2nd, the performance on Saturday finally arrived. I can’t really remember how we actually played, but it was probably reasonably good because on Sunday we were notified that we had reached the Dunedin finals. On Sunday we performed again and attempted to follow all the tips that the adjudicator had left after our last performance to impress him. It seemed to work, as when the results were read out at the end we discovered that we had won and had gained automatic entry to the next round in Christchurch, where we will be performing on Saturday after riding in a cramped car for five hours.