Sophie Visits The Symphony

A few weeks ago, my company, Grey Seal Puppets, had the pleasure of being guest artists for one of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's Lollipop concerts. The Lollipop concerts are geared towards young children, and are designed to help kids learn and appreciate classical music.

Sophie came with Aunt Megan to see the concert. She enjoyed the music, and correctly identified some of the instruments. After the concert was over, we stayed on stage to greet some of the young fans.


Me with Sophie after the concert.


The Symphony's resident conductor, Alan Yamamoto


Sir Purr, the Carolina Panther's mascot, also made an appearance at the show. Sophie was a little shy of him at first...


But she warmed up enough to pet him. She talked about the "big kitty" for the rest of the day!

The concept behind the show was that Seemore Goodstuff (a character Drew performs on our local PBS station) and his friends were investigating the orchestra. They wanted to find out how all the different instruments worked and why the guy in front was waving the funny stick. In the process, we introduced the different families of instruments. One of the final pieces the orchestra played was called "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" by Benjamin Britten. The piece includes a narration which explains which instrument is playing when and what their voice sounds like. Well, since I read music, I was nominated to read all the narration. I had to follow along in a copy of the orchestral score (the narration was written inside the actual score). The piece was 18 minutes long! But it went well.

Most of the pieces they played were familiar or contemporary; "Escape to Neverland" from the movie Hook, "Theme from Peter Gunn" and "The Pink Panther Theme" by Henry Mancini were the most familiar. They ended the concert with a Sousa march, which was a lot of fun. And just being on the stage while the Symphony was playing was pretty amazing in itself.