Yaaaayyyy! (Suzanne)

So, two things have made me rather happy this week. The first is coming back to Hong Kong and realising that the Philharmonic spent their new endowment and corporate sponsorship money on a brand new concert series featuring internationally renowned guest artists. Yesterday, I saw Joshua Bell in concert (He was amazing. I loved it, and I don’t even like the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. It’s a pity I didn’t manage to get his autograph, but they limited it to the first 60 audience members and I wasn’t fast enough.) The week before, I got to watch Charles Dutoit conduct. Next year, Midori, Yundi Li, and Emmanuel Pahud will be playing concertos with the Philharmonic. And, with the exception of the Pahud concert, I’ll be in Hong Kong for all of the new series. And I can watch them for less than the equivalent of $15 Australian dollars, full price. And my Melbourne student card lets me have the 50% student concession, so actually it’ll only cost $7-8. (To put it in perspective, student rush at the Melbourne Symphony costs $20, and you can’t book in advance like you can here.) How awesome is that?

The second thing that makes me happy for this week is:

Legal Method and Reasoning: 73 (H2B)
Practical Study 1-1 (clarinet): 82 (H1)
Principles of Public Law: 83 (H1)
Aural Studies – yearlong subject, grades not released for first semester

Yaaaaay! Especially the two law exams – only 5-10% of the class gets H1s, and I didn’t do so well on the research essays worth 50%, so in order to get the H2B and the H1, I must have gotten H1s on both exams – in the case of the PPL exam, unless there was a huge amount of scaling and shifting afterwards, to get an 83 overall means I got 91% on the exam, and usually only one or two people in the entire year of 400-ish people get over 90% 😀

As for the clarinet exam… good mark, but I think I need to work a lot harder. I want to get into individual program (it’s a subject designed to stretch the people with performance talent or potential – you basically get an extra masterclass with higher expectations, and more individual lesson time) next year, and I’ve heard that you generally have to have around 85% to be seriously considered. Of course, I have no idea how true this is, and I’ve also heard that they require an H1 and then look at each person on a case by case basis, but either way I think 85% is a good goal for next semester for prac. Overall, it all averages out to 79%, which is an H2A, so I think I’ll aim for an H1 average next semester 😀

But until next time…*puts Joshua Bell CD into CD player* so… very… pretty…

EDIT: And he’s on TV on Monday! Yep, soooo skipping Grey’s Anatomy. It’s not like I can’t find it on DVD from someone at college, anyway.