Upcoming Concert: Brahms and Beethoven

“This is the music that made me be a musician. I could have been a vet but THIS music pulled me into music.”

“This is too pretty to play piano.”

“It’s just one of the most beautiful pieces. Ridiculously beautiful.”

These are actual comments - from before and during our rehearsal - by my actual colleagues. Grown up, professional, working musicians who have been around the block a few times and don’t lightly get starry-eyed about just any South Bend Symphony concert.

We are playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece which is incredibly popular and beloved, for the reason that it is great, great music. This will be probably my fourth or fifth time performing this work. Still, when I pulled my music out to prepare, I got excited. It’s so dramatic, and so beautiful, and so perfectly and effectively written for the instruments so we don’t have to strain to be heard and everything just fits. It’s a rare treat.

We’re playing the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which is just sheer perfect loveliness from start to finish. I’ve never actually performed it before, and it’s even more fun than I expected it to be.

AND there’s a Bach Orchestral Suite as the concerto, featuring our own principal flutist, Leslie Short.

As you know I like a little edge to my classical music. I’d rather play 20^th century masterworks than 19^th century ones in general, and I love a world premiere. But if you are going to present a totally standard program of beloved familiar standard works, by all means let it be THIS program, in which every bar of every piece is WONDERFUL.

If you live here and you have not heard the South Bend Symphony perform, this Saturday night would be a great entry point. Details HERE.

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...

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

We took a vacation this summer. This is not news to anyone in my life - anyone who knows me or especially Steve on Facebook followed along with all of our pictures. We took our travel trailer out to Arizona - via St Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, Roswell, Santa Fe - and then stayed a week in Clarksdale and Flagstaff and visited some ancient pueblo ruins, Sedona, Jerome, the Lowell Observatory, the Grand Canyon. We swam in swimming pools, lakes, and icy mountain streams. We hiked. Eventually we came home again, via Albuquerque, Amarillo, Tulsa, and St Louis. (our inventiveness had somewhat worn out). After a week at home we took another trip, and drove to Vermont via western NY and the Adirondack Park (stayed an extra day to hike a mountain), lived four days in East Franklin VT, and came home via Catskill and eastern Ohio. This vacation felt different from all of our previous ones. In the 21 years we’ve been married, I can name on...

ProneOboe

Search This Blog