Tuesday 5 November

Earlier this week we performed in Invercargill, Christchurch and Nelson.

The Opera House in Invercargill was so dark that I couldn’t see the audience so I imagined that I was an opera singer on stage.

The next morning, I had a 6am Zoom class in writing short fiction for my Bachelor of Music degree at Juilliard. There’s only a certain number of classes we can miss each semester so my teacher kindly agreed to let me do this tour as long as I had classes over Zoom. We had to leave by taxi for the airport at 7:15am, so that was a rush.

We flew to Nelson and the drive from the airport to our hotel was beautiful. The air was so clean. It was Saturday and they had all of these markets selling macaroons, Japanese drinks, natural sunscreens and handmade silver earnings. I bought some earrings which are a nice souvenir from Nelson.

In Christchurch, I went to a dessert cafe with my Mum and there was someone I thought I recognised who turned out to be Jiwon Lee from the Auckland Philharmonia who I played with when I first arrived in New Zealand.

She is Korean too and she invited us to visit her Korean church the next day. It was really friendly and there were many young kids in that church which made the energy really vibrant.

They had an important chorus concert at the church at the same time as our concert that night, but she came to see us afterwards and managed to catch the last couple of works.

On Monday, I performed at The Lodge at The Hills in Queenstown which is actually
Michael and Christine’s home.

It was an honour to be back. I rehearsed there while I was preparing for the Michael Hill International Violin Competition last year and it was nice to be back in a more relaxed frame of mind. They gave me a really nice room. I was told that celebrities have stayed there and that was really cool.

We had a nice lunch at the golf clubhouse which gave me energy for the dress rehearsal.

Sir Michael Hill let me borrow his recently acquired Peccatte bow. It was new to me but I felt like I could do advanced techniques on it immediately.

The people at the concert were really warm. The venue was so intimate and it felt less like a concert and more like I could easily connect with the audience.