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