Just eggs

 I'm determined to catch up on my forgotten blogs.  Here's an event that happened in London last spring.

The Big Egg Hunt, from February 21 to Easter weekend, was sponsored by Fabregé.  It  was a plan to have a record breaking egg hunt across Central London to raise money for two causes, the Elephant Family and Action for Children.  Elephant Family helps to preserve the elephant population which is facing extinction. 90% of Asian elephants have disappeared over the past 100 years.  Massive loss of habitat is their greatest threat.  Action for Children is a charity supporting 50,000 of the UK's most vulnerable and neglected children as long as it takes to transform their lives.  At the end of the egg hunt, all the eggs were auctioned off for the charities. 

Over 200 uniquely crafted eggs, created by leading artists, designers, architects and jewelers were hidden across London and over 12,000 people participated (it broke the Guinness World Record)  At the end the eggs were displayed around Covent Garden.  We saw some around the city but it was a lot easier to just go to Covent Garden to see them all!  The Grand Prize was a £100,000 Diamond Jubilee Egg and over £1,000,000 was raised for the charities.  

This is only a sampling of the 200 eggs, all of which were unique and spectacular!

The eggs were two and a half feet tall.

This egg sold for £9,000.  

This was one egg (with picture below)

  

The display at Covent Garden included eggs hung from the rafters

If you found an egg (this one was in Green Park), you could text a number to be entered into the grand drawing of the Diamond Jubilee Egg

This one was in St. James Park in front of Buckingham Palace

Instructions on texting a message to enter the contest

The Diamond Jubilee Egg.  

 It was crafted with Rose Gold and 60 gemstones (diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires)

 one for each year of Queen Elizabeth's  reign.

                                                             That's it.  Just eggs!

A March Diversion-So Percussion concert

With all of London getting ready for the Jubilee and the Olympics, we saw a lot of "diversion" signs in the city this spring.  In the states we call them detours.  Tom and I took a  diversion from  London in late March  to see a concert by So Percussion (Adam's percussion quartet) at Carnegie Hall.  

The day of the concert, I walked from our hotel over to Carnegie Hall.  The first thing I saw was a huge Mayflower moving van.  I thought "Wow, So Percussion really has a lot of equipment for this concert."  I soon found out that the San Francisco Symphony was also playing at Carnegie Hall and they were unloading their equipment.
It was exciting to see the poster for the concert on the outside billboards of Carnegie Hall.  It was even more exciting to see that it was sold out.






The concert was called  "We Are All Going in Different Directions"- A John Cage Celebration. This was a tribute to Cage in honor of his centenary year.






Here's what the Carnegie Hall website said about the concert program.  No one did more to change how we think about music—how we listen to it, make it, perform it—than John Cage. As part ofAmerican Mavericks at Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn-based ensemble So Percussion fetes this challenging composer, who was born 100 years ago in Los Angeles, and whose influence is felt today almost everywhere in American music.

Someone once asked me if percussionists play more than drums. The entire stage was filled with all kinds of drums, computers, soda bottles (filled with water) conch shells and anything else that four percussionists could find to create music.  The number shown on the wall was a digital clock that showed the exact timing of the concert. This was also a tribute to Cage's music which as explained by the New York Times review said, "Even the show’s timing winked at Cage. A backward-counting chronometer projected on the stage wall showed that the program took precisely 91 minutes, the time it would take to perform Cage’s “4’33” ” 20 times: once for each year since his death in 1992.

So Percussion was joined by composers and artists honoring John Cage including Dan Deacon, Matmos, Cenk Ergun and Beth Myers. The concert ended with a standing ovation for the performers.

An after concert reception was hosted by Carnegie Hall to celebrate!

Adam, Cristina and I after the concert



Here is So Percussionn performing John Cage's Third Construction