antidisestablishmentarianism is my favourite word, is it the longest? I started playing the first movement of the Handel harp concerto when I was 6. Last year when I was 7 years old I learnt the rest of it. I played 1 & 3 in the Under 19 Camac International Lever Harp Competition in Nantes in France, it was great, I also played New Blues and a few other tunes as we all had to have two programmes, one 15 minutes long, the other 25 minutes. All the finalist were at least 10 years older than me, The boy who won was twice as big as me so I was happy to come second.
But yesterday was my BEST HARP DAY EVER, I played my Lyon & Healy 85 Petite in the Under 12 Solo Harp Competition at the Urdd, the Welsh Youth Eisteddfod (the biggest youth festival in Europe there is dancing, singing, lots of music). I played Nataliana, by Deborah Henson-Conant. Every school has it first round in January, the school chooses one person to go to the County round, the winner then goes to the Regional round, then yesterday there were the preliminaries, every one plays then after straight after the top three have to play again on stage.
This year the Urdd is in my home town of Cardiff at our new Millennium Centre, the stage was massive and the theatre has nearly two thousand seats, it was great, but I was nervous, but my harp sounded so good and I won.
I still play my lever harp, I really love doing the Handel, it has 52 lever changes, but the pedal harp is better for jazz, and I think you can use the petite in an orchestra – David Watkins told me that he uses a very old Lyon & Healy with 44 strings in the orchestra and he used to be principal harp of The Royal Ballet and the London Philharmonic Orchestra!
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