Skip to main content

Women of the Wind: Musgrave Impromptu

We got our recording back!  It's less than a month since our Women of the Wind performance, and I am so pleased to be able to share some of it with you.  I would love to just stream the whole thing, but one thing that did not come across was our speaking.  Most of it was cut out, and what you can hear is dim and unclear.  What I’ll do, then, is share one work at a time, and include my introductory material to give it some context. 

We opened our program with this magnificent Impromptu by Scottish composer Thea Musgrave.  It was published in 1968, but I discovered it last summer at the IDRS convention, and was wowed from the first moment I heard it.

The piece uses the timbres of the oboe and flute brilliantly.  It's easy with these two instruments to have the oboe sound too pointy, and the flute too diffuse, and of course we had to make adjustments as we played together - but it felt easy to do.  The work lies well for both players and suits both sounds.

I especially love the middle sections, where we repeatedly come into and emerge from low unisons and minor seconds.  The technical parts of the piece were easy to learn (if tricky to play), but the character of those internal episodes took us a while to find as we worked.  


Impromptu #1 by Thea Musgrave
Martha Councell-Vargas, flute,  Jennet Ingle, oboe


Labels:

Comments

  1. OlyaApril 2, 2013 at 2:52 PM

    Once again, I really enjoyed your playing. You guys blend unbelievably well! Flute and oboe can be a difficult combination to make sound good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JennetApril 3, 2013 at 10:48 PM

    I completely agree about the difficulty. This is why we love Martha...

    Thank you, Olya!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blog has MOVED

 Have you been waiting ... and waiting ... and WAITING for a new Prone Oboe post?  Don't wait here anymore!  The blog has moved to https://jennetingle.com/prone-oboe/  and will not be updated here on Blogger anymore.  Please come and check me out there!  I love you all - stay safe out there!  Jennet
Post a Comment
Read more

How Do You WISH You Could Describe Your Reeds?

In Reed Club last Monday, we took a moment before we started scraping to set some intentions.  We each said one word - an adjective to describe what we WANTED our reeds to be.  An aspirational adjective. Efficient was a word that came up, and Consistent . Dark and Mysterious . Mellow . Predictable .  Trustworthy .  Honest .  BIGGER . Reed affirmations actually felt helpful - both in the moment and in the results we found as we worked.  I don't know why that surprises me - I set intentions at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of a run, in the morning before I work.  I love a good affirmation.  I love WORDS.  But I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of applying one to the mundane work of reed-making.   You don't have to know exactly how to GET to that result.  But having clarity in your mind about what that result is?  Helps you to stop going down unhelpful rabbit holes...
2 comments
Read more

Micro Rests

 For oboists, endurance is a huge problem.  We can play an endlessly long phrase, because of the way the instrument is constructed, but we can really only do that a few times in a row before our embouchure starts to get fatigued.  We develop a buildup of air that feels exhausting to hold onto, and the thought of sustaining that kind of energy over  an entire page of music, much less a 45 minute recital program, is intimidating.    There's almost always a lesson, a week or two before a jury or a recital, where my student comes in and says, "I just can't DO this! I can play every detail in my music, but I can't put the whole thing together!  My mouth comes right off the oboe when I try - I'm going to fall apart in front of the audience, and it's going to be terrible!"  Look, I'm putting this on my students now - but there's a moment a week or so before MY performances that feels exactly the same! I have not outgrown this moment of panic. And at that...
Post a Comment
Read more