When a client asked us to stage his 40th birthday fireworks at his home on the Greek island of Mykonos, there were no shortage of volunteers! This was a particularly demanding brief as our client not only lived several thousand miles away, he was an opera buff with an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything from Nessun Dorma to Norma. He wanted his display choreographed to his favourite passages, not the well-known arias but little gems tucked away in the middle acts. We had to obtain specific recordings from which to extract his chosen music, involving numerous trips to libraries and obscure internet sites. There folllowed many telephone conversations between here and Mykonos to identify the exact pieces, and where we couldn’t locate them the client would sing them down the telephone line!

When it came to staging the display we teamed up with our Greek fireworks colleagues from the Athens-based company Nanos. Being able to source the fireworks so close to the venue saved a huge amount on shipping costs and we were able to use Nanos’s experience to obtain local permissions and book the barge on which the show was to be fired. The display was on such a grand scale that none of the local barges was big enough and we had to bring one over from the mainland. We designed the display in the UK, sent it to Nanos who then assembled everything we needed. Our crew flew to Mykonos, linked up with the crew from Nanos and on a perfect September evening the show was fired without a hitch. The client was almost moved to tears by the beauty of the display and the emotion of the occasion.