Skip to main content

My New CD is ALMOST HERE!

The oboe is a beautiful and a noble instrument, largely overlooked by big-name composers writing solo works.  My new CD aims to address this imbalance.  Have you ever wondered what the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto would sound like on an oboe?  How about the Gershwin Piano Preludes? This is your chance to find out!


Music That SHOULD Have Been Written for the Oboe will be available for purchase on iTunes, CDBaby, and Amazon (and from me) on December 2, 2016.  But you can pre-order right now on my website, and I will fulfill all orders during the week of November 28.  Get it before anyone else! 




Also, here's a treat from the disc.  The second of Gershwin's Three Preludes is so gentle, so loving, so intimate, so passionate. I simply loved playing it with the great Paul Hamilton, and I hope you enjoy it here! Click to listen





Comments

  1. “MUSIC THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN FOR THE OBOE”



    JUST FOR THE RECORD…….(Now they are called CD’s)

    La belle Dame ….. Hath me in Thrall….

    Finally I received the recording of the oboe pieces performed by my peerless friend Jennet Ingle. These pieces, a delight in themselves in any concert, had been written for other instruments, but Jennet, in a moment, (actually many moments) of creative enthusiasm rearranged them for the oboe. Her own oboe. And she performed them in various venues, and I was fortunate enough to follow their creative evolution from the first performance to the completed CD.
    After I listened to the recording a couple of times I started, as I had intended, to listen to the music on their original instruments. So I traveled with Debussy to the island of Capri, very popular in his day, where, maybe he saw (and wooed) a girl with flaxen hair and Syrinx! The ancient pipe whose bucolic tunes he successfully recreated. But they sounded so much more natural on Jennet’s oboe; as if they belonged there…
    But the Mendelssohn violin concerto has a special place in the auditory space of my brain. When I was studying the violin as a young teenager, there was a girl, a couple of years older and much more advanced, who was practicing the concerto opening on her violin. I listened and expressed my admiration at both the piece and her playing. Next time I saw her she was practicing scales but when she saw me she started the Mendelssohn……
    I heard Jennet play her arrangement for the oboe a couple of times, in a couple of venues. I never cease to marvel, with envy, at the way Jennet tries and succeeds in reaching her desired, combined goal of technique and sonority.
    I truly enjoyed Bach’s violin sonata VI. All my life I have had a feeling that listening to Bach requires a certain amount of work. I really think, however that this sonata SHOULD have been written for the oboe.
    The Gershwin preludes brought me back to the familiar realities of the 20eth century.
    I was very impressed by the high technical quality of the recording. Even though I tried to listen I did n’ t hear any breathing referred to in Jennet’s earlier blog- only my own breath being taken away….
    Maybe I expected it, sort of, to hear some introductory remarks about the pieces, because I had heard Jennet Ingle do that in live performances before. A bit unconventional but not unheard of.
    Congratulations Jennet! We truly thank you. You have entered the holy temple. Approach the altar and officiate with Orpheus’ heirloom.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

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...

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...