Moving Performance Blog

A friend of mine has recently gone to Haiti in a nursing capacity to help the victims of the recent earth quake. The conditions were war-zone-like – a make-shift hospital had been set up inside a large tent alongside the runway at Port-au-Prince. The patients, many suffering from horrible injuries, were lined up in long…

A tale of two concerts and two leadership styles. Over the last week I have witnessed first hand two conducting and leadership styles, that speak a simple message which is so relevant to leadership in the workplace. The first was a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, possibly the hardest piece for a conductor to…

Have you ever been in the situation where a new boss comes in who just doesn’t have a clue? I witnessed it this week in an orchestra rehearsal. The conductor was a “choral” conductor who knew seemed to know very little about conducting let alone rehearsing an orchestra. We were “rehearsing” Rossini’s Stabat Mater ahead…

In an open forum speaking event in a corporate conference exhibition hall recently, I played a group of delegates (all strangers to me and to each other) the song Beautiful by James Blunt. I asked them to reflect on how it made them feel. A youngish lady puts her hand up and says “it made…

I played golf with Tiger Woods a few weeks ago. …actually I didn’t, but I did have the opportunity one evening to play my french horn in one of the leading orchestras in the UK, alongside their horn section. This, I tell my friends, is a bit like going for a round of golf with…

I came across this video of Obama introducing a night of music from the Civil Rights movement at the White House. He speaks about the music (freedom songs) providing a “soundtrack to the movement” which “gave strength” and that the movement was “sustained by music”.  Interestingly, Dr King when looking to mobilise communities, focused on those…