Upcoming Concerts: Variety Pack Edition

I’ve had an amazing time playing Don Giovanni this month - and the schedule has been busy enough that the opera is all I’ve had time for. Two or three operas a week plus teaching feels fantastic in my schedule! I’ve even had time to give some attention to Musicians for Michiana and the fundraising we are trying to do for that.

But the opera performances are becoming more sparse as we approach the end of the run, and I have some real orchestra work starting up again, and it feels great to be preparing new material!

This Sunday the SBSO has a chamber concert, and I’m excited to be back with my colleagues at the beautiful DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. We’re doing a program of female composers, to honor Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and that’s the most relevant I’ve ever seen this orchestra get, and I’m delighted for that reason alone! The highlight will be a world premiere: a work by a local composer which expresses the emotions of her own personal journey through cancer. Should be uplifting? I hope? She’s a living composer, so that’s a good sign…

Next week the Northwest Indiana Symphony is performing Holst’s The Planets, and we’re partnering with the Adler Planetarium to present some visuals along with the music. I have a lot of rests in some movements so I hope to be wowed myself, at least in the rehearsals when I dare to look around.

And the following weekend we have a pops concert here in South Bend - featuring the music of QUEEN. Because, you know, we are the champions.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been playing the same five pages of music over and over for the past three weeks, but I’m absolutely looking forward to this variety pack- fifteen services in ten days, five different programs (including a quintet gig and another opera or two). What a treat to be a musician in the fall!

Comments

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...

ProneOboe

Search This Blog