Last Week Tonight with Alexander the Great

Last weekend I played La Mer and Fountains of Rome with the Ontario Philharmonic, which is in Oshawa; I’ve driven to that orchestra before, but I ended up carless for some services this time, so took the train as far as it goes, Hamilton to Oshawa:

A small miracle: on my way home from that concert, the Oshawa to Hamilton train by necessaity passing through a minor town in between where there was a concert apparently attended by a couple people at least… my train pulled out of Union station ten minutes before the reported end of the Taylor Swift set.

At a choral concert last month, I read in the program that one of the involved choirs’ next concert was Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with the Hamilton Philharmonic, one of my favourite pieces, which I got to play some of last year, but hadn’t expected to ever play for real. “I can’t believe they’re doing Alexander’s Feast in Hamilton and I’m not playing it,” I thought, distraught, and manifested an email hiring me for it the next day.

That concert was paired this week with a chamber music concert of Mozart’s Gran Partita, which fatigue-wise is not really what you want to have a dress rehearsal for right before a concert of Baroque continuo.