Skip to main content

Upcoming Concert

This weekend's concert in South Bend is an exciting one. Peter Maxwell Davies's An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise is a beautiful piece and one which I had not encountered before. It was composed in 1985, which is not sooo contemporary in the scheme of things, but it's surprisingly rare in my life now to play new music and I love it! The Mendelssohn Scottish Symphony is an intimate chamber work disguised as a large symphony. Incidentally there's lots of oboe in it, but mostly I'm enjoying hearing my colleagues show off. And we will rehearse the Bruch Scottish Fantasy tonight for the first time, but I expect great things. It's a lovely piece, too. Hope to see a big crowd!

Saturday night at 8.
Click HERE for details and ticket information.


Masterworks III
Scottish Fantasy

Kyoko Takezawa, violin

An evening with a distinctly Scottish flair, complete with bagpiper Sean Meehan, opens with Maxwell Davies’ An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. Kyoko Takezawa, one of the most sought after violin soloists, brings her amazing interpretive insight and indisputable talent to Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy- playing with a richness of virtuosic feeling combined with fiery intensity. The concert concludes with a perennial favorite, Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony No. 3.
Program Notes | Maestro's Insights

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zoe's Musical Beginnings

I've mentioned before that I started out on the piano by figuring out melodies.  Connecting notes and trying to learn how they worked.  I'm fascinated to observe that Zoe's initial approach to the instrument is totally different from mine. She sits at our new piano and plays random notes, and tells us what to feel.  If she is playing slowly then the music is sad, and we should cry. When we are "crying" she either gets up and hugs us so we feel better (so awesome!) or bangs faster, to indicate that the music is now happy and we should dance.  Her other piano game is accompanying herself - she plays "chords" in alternating hands while she "sings" the ABC song or Camptown Races or Sesame Street.  She makes us sing along.  She loves it when we clap at the end.  When I was little I wanted to know how music worked. Although I make my living as a performer now, I learned about the interpersonal aspects of music later.  Her immediate interest is in ...

Cleaning Your Reeds

Updated: I've posted a video of my plaque cleaning technique HERE ! Oboe reeds are made from organic material, and over time it is inevitable that they will age and change. The first few days of change are usually quite welcome, as you break the reed in by playing and the opening gradually settles down to something you can be comfortable with and the response becomes more and more predictable.  You might even hit a plateau where it appears to be perfectly consistent and reliable for several days! But after that, the reed seems to be on a constant gradually accelerating downslope, until it eventually collapses into a sharp, non-responsive, mushy mess. We can rejuvenate the reed during this time by cleaning it, and can often extend its life as well! There are three good ways to do this. First, least invasively, you can just run some fresh water through and over the reed AFTER you play each time.  Go ahead and rinse that reed in the sink, shake it as dry as possible, a...

Knife Sharpening

I've gotten a lot of questions on this topic, and the most recent querent prompted me to make a video to demonstrate.  You can find that  HERE . Knife sharpening seems to strike terror into many hearts.  And it's little wonder.  Many famous oboists have gone on record as saying that a sharp knife is the most important aspect of reed making. People have entire systems of stones and strops and rods set up to sharpen their knives. And it is important, of course it is - but I don't believe that you need your knife to be razor-like, or objectively the sharpest blade of any in your home.  The reed knife has one job - scraping cane off in precision ways - and it has to be sharp enough for that, and sharpened optimally for that purpose.  More than that is overly fussy for my taste. This is not to say that I allow my knife to be dull.  A dull knife forces you to put too much pressure on the reed and can cause cracking. Obviously it can lead to terribly inc...