This week in celebration of the opening of the 2019 Michael Hill International Violin Competition, we asked RNZ Concert listeners to break out their feathered pens and write some poetry.
Violin Photo: 123rf
It's the Ode to the Violin contest.
The top winning poems will receive a package of four CDs by previous MHIVC winners.
Here are our top five favourite entries:
Libby of Christchurch, writes:
Oh cruel mistress!
You wooed me with promises of joy divine.
But l could never possess you. You wanted all my thoughts, all my time, The very heart of me. I cast you aside,
Only to hear you singing now In others arms.
Lukas, age 12, from Auckland writes:
This is an ode to my violin.
Which is my love and my yang to my yin.
I look after my bow. Like it is my Romeo.
When I die, lay it in my coffin. My heart lies with my violin. Playing her is where each day ends and begins.
I am lit, all aglow. With each fortissimo.
She is my all, my star, my heroine.
Joan from Hamilton takes on the Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams:
Violin, I love you so
Where you lead, there I will go
Through joy and sadness, love and hope
With these emotions I can cope
Violin, not wanting to nark
Why do you need to play The Lark?
Morn ascends when sun is lit
Evening grief sinks without it
If you play Brahms
I have no qualms
I can sit
Through Mozart’s wit
Elgar’s pace
Is no disgrace
Tchaikovsky
He works for me
If you leave The Lark alone
Violin, I’ll have no groan
Through joy and sadness, love and hope
With you I’ll stay for many a day.
Ian, from parts unknown, gets philosophical:
The spruce is loose with its wood,
The pine its resin, the horse its hair
The cat regrets its gut,
But,
If you’re a Strad, you can’t be bad.
An Amati? You can party,
And a Guarnari is a stringed Ferrari,
Owner from Cremona.
Stringed thing
Take wing, sing!
Oh! You need a hand?
To play in the band,
Someone to twiddle with the fiddle,
So violinist take a bow
(or is that bow, I don’t know).
Sara, from Dunedin, writes an ode to extreme patience:
Metallic strings that jar
And fail to keep in tune from lesson to lesson,
Sticky tapes across the fingerboard
Ignored by tiny fingers, out of tune.
Pads of foam held on with rubber bands.
An open string concert each weekend.
Bemused parents wonder why
The object of their six-year-old’s desire
Should be an eighth-sized violin.
These entries were passed through the crucible of RNZ Concert's Friday afternoon staff, and the winners have been judged:
Libby from Christchurch and Sara from Dunedin!
Congrats to our wordsmiths, and, judging from your poems, you'll be glad to be hearing the violin in the hands of talented professionals. Keep an ear out for RNZ Concert's coverage of the 2019 Michael Hill International Violin Competition on air and online over the next week.
