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.
The setup for last night’s concert: you know the party’s really getting started when they bring out the third harpsichord.
I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…
Which I won’t need next week, because next week’s Baroque show is BWV 149, a bassoon part that calls to mind Bach sitting at his desk thinking “gee, I sure hope someone completely reinvents this instrument in a hundred years or so.”
The Burlington Performing Arts Centre is very committed to ensuring things to not fall in the orchestra pit. Which is appreciated, however, has the amusing effect that the conductor needs to stand on the podium located under the net while sticking their head out of this… conductor hole.
Playing La Bohème this week, calling to mind the words of my conducting teacher, Alain Cazes, at music school: “If you ever have the chance to listen to a Puccini opera with the score, you will freak out! I guarantee it! You will freak out!”
With the fish that haven’t been stolen
They told me to kiss the bricks but they weren’t kissing back
Mr. Maxym’s bassoon in the process of being restored, Canadian dime possibly by Stéphane?
The real purpose of a trip to Indiana: a bassoon overhaul by Paul Nordby. My bassoon hasn’t been touched by anyone but me since before I got the Regina job, so I’d developed something of a “if something goes wrong it’s because you suck, learn to make a reed, idiot” approach to diagnosing issues. (A philosophy not scorned in the Nordby studio, it seems: several buttons strung up proclaimed the motto “Schmuck, go home and practice!”) However, now that the pads on the instrument actually seal and the corks/felt aren’t thirty seconds from falling right off, playing the right notes at the right time at the right pitch has never felt so possible!
The day before yesterday, while integrating line charges, I put Handel’s Alexander’s Feast on to keep me company; an oratorio on the text of a very silly Dryden poem, which I like because it has sick tunes and also because I love Alexander and particularly Alexander portrayed as a complete wacko clown.
Please, Mr. Stone, I don’t want a thinly veiled Iraq War allegory, I want whatever the hell this is! (Talbot Shrewsbury Book, 1444)
“What a goofy oratorio,” thinks I, integrating, “too bad I’ll probably never get to play it.” Though, only playing the bassoon here would not quite be sufficient. Much as we all know that playing percussion is just as difficult, subtle, and lifelong an enterprise as playing any other instrument (not even counting all the loading and unloading while everyone packs up and goes home!), Now strike the golden lyre again is the kind of timpani part that makes you think, “hey, I could play that. In fact, I want to play that. I ought to play that! I GOTTA play that! Someone get me two big drums to bang RIGHT NOW!”
…and then, the very next day, what should appear in my very own inbox but a gig full of Handel, including three numbers from Alexander’s Feast. (But only on bassoon. Womp womp. )
Got a Landwell in an under-the-table-stand knife deal at the halftime of pops with the Hamilton Phil tonight… now I have to learn how to sharpen a knife like an oboist properly
I was playing a concert recently with a rather speedy Bach continuo part. As I was practicing, it occurred to me to wonder what exactly had happened to the technique of double-tonguing on the bassoon in the first part of the 20th century.
Plenty of Baroque continuo parts, including those usually including bassoon, contain passages that only the most freakish of wagglers could single-tongue. It seems obvious that Baroque bassoonists must have been able to double tongue; and sure enough, in JJ Quantz’s chapter on articulation, after describing several tonguing techniques including double tonguing, he notes:
Why Quantz thinks you can’t double tongue on the oboe is a mystery for another day (or for a Baroque oboist to tell me); the point is, bassoonists were known double-tonguers in 1752, if not known good-reed-havers.
Why, then, did double-tonguing seem to disappear from the toolbox for a period of time? That it did is of course anecdotal, but it does seem to me that among the generation of professional bassoonists who got jobs in the early or mid 20th century, it was very much an optional technique. That generation is largely gone from the active playing scene, but many people still have stories of teachers or older colleagues who didn’t double tongue, and I have even heard it said by some of those players that bassoons don’t double tongue, or that if they do it is a new invention. (This does seem to be largely true on clarinet. “Fucking slur two tongue two… shit!”)
What if Clive Barker had a fever dream of Snow White as imagined by Angela Carter? This is the question nobody but me asked, but I imagine Angelin Preljocaj’s Blanche Neige to answer.
Winnipeg is one of my favourite orchestras to play with, and recently I was invited to play guest principal for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of this show. The draw for musicians is that it’s a new ballet constructed entirely out of Mahler symphonies; but once I watched a video of a previous production sent to the orchestra, I was also excited for the reaction to the work, which is– look, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that this is a very sexy ballet. The costumes were designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. The sexy cats had headgear intended to convey the danceable impression of ball gags. When Snow White eats the apple, it’s less a trick and more of an orgasmic force feeding.
I’m not casting aspersions. It all– in my opinion, from the production I did watch and the reaction of the Winnipeg audience– worked great. There is something about the project of presenting Mahler as anything other than an integral whole symphony that invites, nearly demands, a certain amount of enjoyable grotesquerie; Ken Russell comes to mind. That said, the music was not as chopped up as you might think it would have to be; no crazy cuts and very few significant alterations to make the music fit the dance. There were even two entire movements, the Purgatorio of the Tenth symphony and the third movement of the First, which accompanied probably one of the most memorable stagings in the show: the introduction of the seven dwarves (I think credited here instead as “miners”), an entire vertical ballet taking place on a sheer rock face, one of the pieces of it that is available online:
The only really wacky alteration was this section, from the very end of the 3rd movement of the Third symphony, being repeated eleven times:
…which is how I learned that in the Brothers Grimm version of the story, the happily ever after is that the Prince orders the evil Queen to dance herself to death while wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes, which is what is happening during the above. Disney sure didn’t mention that part!
Anyway, I’m very much hoping that the National Ballet or some other company around these parts picks this up, as I’d like to see it properly!
The last time I was at the National Music Camp, I was 14 and played a bassoon for the first time in the beginning bassoon elective. This summer I returned as a faculty member. (Full disclosure… once I started playing bassoon in earnest, my allegiance was firmly to the other music camp, on the grounds that the dining hall was quieter and they didn’t make you do “evening program,” so I never actually attended as a camper on bassoon.)
I didn’t take all that many pictures– one of the excellent things this camp did was take away all the camper’s phones, so there just wasn’t much photo-taking culture in the absence of ubiquitous devices. To be honest, I suspect a lot of the kids (those who didn’t sneak them in anyway, that is) were relieved to have them gone for a week. Hey, maybe they’ll do the same for the faculty in the future!
Laurel leading a very cozy band sectional
A bat taking a rest outside the bassoon studio (I realize this does not exactly look like the peak of bat health, but at least it flew away and we didn’t have a dead bat to deal with…)
Not a camper any more… they can’t force me to stay in the loud horrible dining hall… ate all my meals on the dock with my buddy Montaigne.
Very good doggo getting ready to listen to faculty wind quintet rehearsal
Pulled out the 2nd cello suite for a faculty concert
I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…
With the fish that 
They told me to 
Mr. Maxym’s bassoon in the process of being restored, Canadian dime possibly by Stéphane?
