Yesterday we went to the Royal Albert Hall in London, where we watched ‘A Classical Spectacular’. I thought it really was spectacular! We watched one of the best orchestras in the world, as the conductor said, called the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra!
We had been given really rubbishy seats at the top where we wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but Mummy said to the reception, ‘Please can we have a box seat?’ The reception said to go and ask the people at the top of the stairs. They said to go and ask the steward. The steward said to go and ask his supervisor. His supervisor said, ‘Do you have any particular reason to go in a box seat?’ Mummy said, ‘Well, it’ll be a bit noisy up there next to all those school groups…’ The supervisor spoke into her audio thing, and said, ‘Yeah, alright. Just follow me,’ and we were taken to the very best seats in the whole of the Royal Albert Hall!
We were in the Grand Tier, in a box seat with velveteen chairs and a door and posh red curtains you could close, with coat pegs outside! We got to sit at the very front, and best of all, the orchestra were directly in front of us, only a little way away! The only thing wrong with the whole performance was that we were also directly in front of the lights, so, if they were whizzing round the audience, and for that split second they settled on us as they went round, we got bright lights in our eyes. But ‘A Classical Spectacular’ made up for that for us!
The orchestra played lots of different songs. My favourites were ‘Morning’, by Grieg, and the last one, called ‘The 1812’, by Tshaikovsky, which I will tell you more about later. I was a little shocked sometimes, especially at the end, when the conductor was giving round of-applauses. He said, ‘And finally, I think that the parents and teachers out there get a round-of-applause, because, parents and teachers, I understand how hard it is to bring the children out to trips like this, so – round-of-applause for the teachers and parents! Woooooohoo!’ I daresay I hope it’s not ‘hard’ for Mummy to take me out all day! 😉
Just before that an opera singer called Alexander James Edwards sung Nessun Dorma, by Puccini. He sang a couple more as well, and on one of them the conductor told him to sing the last bit again because those were the hardest notes! One of them was about a funicular railway like the one in Hastings, which is a bit of an odd opera song, but there you go, there is one!
The orchestra also played ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The conductor said, ‘Most of the time it is traditional to wave English flags at the end of this song, but instead we’ll do.. a, er, a – umm – the biggest Mexican Wave in the whole of the Royal Albert Hall!’ So that was what we did. The schoolchildren who didn’t participate took off their neon yellow high-vis jackets and waved them round, or waved their camera flashlights round for all the crowd to see! It was more fun doing the Mexican Wave, though!
‘The 1812’ was the absolute best one. It was the one where the cannons went off, and the army men with their guns shot bullets (pretend bullets and cannon balls, of course), and made absolutely enormous noises! Fireworks went off as well, and it was really fun! There was a gigantic net of balloons as well, red and white and blue ones, probably to resemble the English flag. We thought that the net would collapse at some point and the balloons would go flying everywhere, but our dreams didn’t come true 😉 However, it was really really very very really really really really spectacular!
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When it finished we went in the Science Museum. It was great fun! We went to all the interactive sections mostly, but I enjoyed reading the interesting things. I played a mini game where you had to drive a car – backwards. If you turned the wheel left, you went right, if you turned it right, you went left. But what annoyed me a little bit was that when you went forward, you went forward. If you’re going to have a game where you do everything backward, you may as well go forward when you go backward and backward when you go forward! However, the other games were really fun. I also found a room full of clocks – that was one of my greatest joys of the day! There were mainly really vintage, old ones, and also some little square slaps of paintings that people engrave to show they’re good enough engraving to be a clock-engrave-y-person! I really want to go there again, and maybe go in the Space Simulator!
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Of course, if you go to London for the day, you can’t go home without a dinner out! We decided to go to our favourite restaurant, Masala Zone, but we couldn’t get a table for three until 9:15, so we went to a sushi restaurant instead. I had these vegetable roll-y type things, and had a little of Tilly’s sushi and Mummy’s chicken.
The tube home was really busy, but the train was actually empty apart from us and five or six other people spaced out among the carriages. We made up some songs based on Christmas 😉
I would love to go in the Space Simulator, I would love to sing the songs again, I would love to go in the sushi restaurant again, and most of all I would love to see Spectacular again!