As I’ve mentioned in the past, for the past three summers I’ve been playing with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada in the summers. NYOC is a great program but I decided that it was time for me to do something new, so for the first time since entering McGill I didn’t audition this summer. Instead, this June I’ll be in Ottawa participating in the senior division of the National Arts Centre’s Young Artists Program. Whereas NYOC is an orchestra program with chamber music at the beginning of the session, the description of the YAP program states: “5 exceptional wind musicians will be selected for a unique one-on-one mentorship experience with their respective NAC Orchestra Wind Principal on orchestral & solo repertoire and together as a wind quintet coached by all Principals of the NAC Orchestra Wind Quintet.” So, that’s what I’ll be doing in June! I’m really excited to have a different kind of summer experience, and to study with the great players on faculty there.
I’m playing in the master class with Ole Kristian Dahl at 2 PM, and there’s another masterclass in the morning, a concert in the evening and people will be hanging out in the vendor’s room for the rest of the day. Given the photo, I’m going to be really disappointed if there is not actually a transparent bassoon in attendance… I don’t know where the picture is from, but the only one that I know of is that of Lionel Bord, bassoonist in L’Orchestre de Paris, who demonstrates its many excellent qualities in this video, among others:
Check out the pictures from the NSO’s holiday pops and family concerts on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638763933986/http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765859823/http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765363575/ I especially like the angle on the tinsel and light-up icicles that Cathi brought as decorations for our bells. :P And the maestro’s spiffy guitar and guitar-playing jacket. A few days ago my family also played a concert/sing-along at the Runnymede hospital. My dad played piano, my mom flute, my brother viola and obviously I played bassoon. (Perhaps not so obviously… my mom suggested that I go play Christmas carols at my brother’s school on violin… an instrument I haven’t practiced for about five years.) It seemed like the patients enjoyed it, although my dad’s jazz-inspired improvisational wanderings based on popular Christmas carols certainly confused a few who were expecting a simple sing-along! Now that (most of) the crazy travelling is done I can finally focus just on the Toronto Symphony audition, which is coming up in less than a month! Also learning my parts for the next MGSO concert– principal on Bruckner’s 2nd symphony and Janacek’s From The House of the Dead overture. My recital is also coming up next semester, which will be my last semester at McGill! Aaa! (Yesssssssssss…..) I have the program mostly planned, and have already performed half of the repertoire and started working on some of the rest. Still– at McGill you only have one official recital during your degree (as well as two juries performed just for a panel of professors) so this will be my first time doing an entire recital all by myself. So I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that as the time approaches…
I just got my copy of the CD that the NYOC recorded this summer, and am very excited to listen to it! We spent two days recording in the Multi-Media Room at McGill, and the CD includes Mahler’s Ninth symphony and the commissioned work for this year, which was written by McGill student James O’Callaghan. It doesn’t seem to be up on iTunes yet bu you can buy a physical copy here !
Yesterday, the musicians of the McGill Symphony orchestra (well over a hundred of us!) played to a nearly full house at Maison Symphonique, the home of the OSM in Montreal’s place Des Arts. Here is some media coverage of the event– Claude Gingras says it best in his last paragraph: Année après année, Hauser anime avec la même passion cet orchestre constamment renouvelé. Les effectifs changent, forcément, mais le résultat demeure toujours du plus haut niveau. On ne voit vraiment pas qui pourrait remplacer Alexis Hauser à McGill! (Year after year, Hauser animates the constantly renewed orchestra with the same passion. The players change, but the result is always at the highest level. It is difficult to see who could ever replace Alexis Hauser at McGill!) I feel incredibly grateful to have been able to play in Hauser’s orchestra for the last two years of my time at McGill. His energy, musical intelligence and kindness are inspirational to all the students he conducts, and I look forward to another semester-and-one-third of music-making at McGill!
Recently, I got a new toy! It’s an MD Reeds profiler, which I ordered at the end of last school year after a period of some, although by no means exhaustive, research of the profiler market. I admit I was partly lured in my the shiny price tag– at $600, it’s less than half the price of a lot of the other models I was looking at. Since it seems to be getting generally good reviews from the bassoon community and some people are even saying the design is an improvement on existing models, I decided to give it a go. I’m only just in the process of finishing my first batch of reeds with the new profiler, and since I’ve only ever used two profilers before (the Ben Bell profiler we have at school and a borrowed Popkin to top off my cane supply this summer) I’m probably not in the best position go give a comprehensive review. However, it seems top be working great for me so far. Since I had never set up a profiler on my own before, I definitely appreciated how easy the MD model is to adjust– for instance, I didn’t know where I would want the ramp to be, so I just made a bunch of cane of a few different settings, changing them quickly and easily using the click-wheel underneath the ramp. Now I just need to buy a shaper and then I can make reeds completely independently of the school’s equipment, which will be nice since they have pretty strict rules about when you can sign it out and bring it back. Yay!
I played my first concert with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra last over the weekend. Here’s some local news coverage of the show: http://youtu.be/QnWJrB93auw
Oops… I haven’t written here in a while. In that time, things have happened! First, the last week of the summer I went to camp! The Interprovincial Music Camp is a terrific camp outside of Parry Sound which I attended as a student in high school. Fraser Jackson, the contrabassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, was on faculty there, and after my first year at the camp I became his student and stayed in his studio until I left for university. Then, last year, Fraser emailed me and asked if I would like to come back to camp as his Faculty Assistant. Every faculty member is allowed to choose an assistant, usually a university-aged student of theirs or a young professional player, to teach with them at camp. So this was my second year doing that and it was awesome! As well as being a great experience teaching, it’s also lots of fun because all of the faculty assistants, many of us who know each other from school or summer festivals, live together in two big cabins near the entrance to the camp, with our own fire pit and easy access to the lake. Unlike the camp councillors, who are usually similar in age, the faculty assistants have no responsibilities to deal with the campers other than in strictly musical contexts, whereas the councillors have to take care of a cabin full of kids and– having been a camper, I can imagine how difficult and frustrating this must be– keep them quiet at night. Because there aren’t usually too many bassoon students, I also get lots of time to practice at camp, which is awesome since the camp takes place the week before the return to school and thus the auditions for the university ensembles. One of my favourite things to do at camp is practice outside, which you sure can’t do in Montreal for most of the year! I was happy with how the audition at school went, and although this concert I’m only playing one piece (principal on the Ginastera Harp concerto) next concert I get to play principal on Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2– and at Maison Symphonnique, instead of McGill’s Pollack Hall where the McGill Symphony Orchestra usually plays! Then, two days ago, I did another audition, for the Niagara Symphony Orchestra in St. Catherine’s, for whom I’m happy to say I am now principal bassoon! The audition day was a doubleheader in which they hired for both principal oboe and bassoon, and I’m really excited to play my first concert with them in almost exactly a month (they had already hired a bassoon and oboe for the first concert, so myself and the winner of the oboe audition are playing our first show on the second concert of the season.) However, I don’t have a contract or a detailed rehearsal schedule yet, so it remains to be seen how much I’m going to have to wiggle out of McGill obligations for Niagara stuff! Now I can finally take a break from practicing excerpts (except for Rite of Spring– since the MGSO is playing it on the last concert of the first semester, the McGill bassoon studio is holding a separate audition for the principal part that will take place some time later in the semester) and focus on Bach’s 2nd cello suite, which I will play in a masterclass for Nadina Mackie Jackson next week. She is coming to perform the bassoon sequenza in an enormous Berio extravaganza concert next Friday. I actually love Berio, so I’m really excited to hear it! (Check out my colleague from this summer, Sam Fraser, performing a hilarious comedy act entitled “The Lost Berio Sequenza” at the NYO talent show this summer: http://youtu.be/DMUoqpLzqJU )
One of the things that I didn’t mention in my last post was my audition for the Winnipeg Symphony, which I played during the first day off from NYO (and made it back in time for madrigals the next morning!) Obviously, I didn’t win the job, or I probably would have mentioned it. However, I am enormously glad that I did the audition. The main reason is that my low playing and tuning in that register improved enormously from the preparation I did for the audition. For some reason, when I got back from India and started preparing for Winnipeg, I suddenly got fed up with always having to worry about whether I was gonna be able to play a low D, for example, low enough, and decided to just learn how to do it already. Easier said than done, of course, but at some point you do have to say it! The first thing I did was play a huge number of long tones in that area, and experiment until I figured out what to do with my mouth in order to manipulate the pitch while keeping the note stable. (I lowered my teeth. Which isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation, I know, but sometimes you just need to think about it and practice it the right way for it to actually click…) I also had a few lessons with Sam Banks, the second bassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, who encouraged me to start making reeds specifically for low, soft playing and let me play some of his in order to understand what that could actually feel like. By the time I got to the audition, I could play the excerpt from Brahms violin concerto, for example, without being worried that the notes wouldn’t speak, which was–embarrassingly– a huge revelation! It also came in handy when I got back to NYO, where I was playing 2nd on the Sibelius violin concerto. Anyway, besides improving at that specific aspect of my playing, it was also a huge challenge to prepare for the audition in less time than I had to prepare for KW (a month as opposed to three months) and continue my preparation the week before the audition while taking part in NYO. Although it was difficult to find time to practice during the week I was doing both, it was also enormously helpful to be surrounded by so many faculty members willing to volunteer their time above and beyond the regular coachings. Gabe Radford, the 3rd horn of the Toronto Symphony, was particularly helpful– he always leads a discussion/lecture with the faculty on auditioning, which all of the wind and brass students attend and can ask questions at, and after that I asked him to listen to some of my excerpt in a mock audition style. I ended up playing three “rounds” for him, each one beginning with me waiting a few minutes outside the door to his office, as in a real audition, and practicing thinking the kinds of thoughts I would want to be thinking before walking into the audition room. He was even able to tell me some things about how the setup of the audition would be, having played in that orchestra himself. The audition itself went really well for me. Almost everyone there knew each other from various places (and most were from Ontario) so it was a very friendly atmosphere. I was very calm and played everything exactly as I had practiced it, which is really all you can ever ask for! I have to admit, although before I played I didn’t let my thoughts get away from me and concentrated only on playing well, in the time between when I finished playing and when they announced the second round I allowed myself to get my hopes up and thus was slightly disappointed when they only took one person (not me) into the second round. Luckily all the rest of us were friends, went out for lunch and had a pleasant day in Winnipeg anyway. (We later found out that they had stopped after the second round and didn’t end up hiring.) As per the advice from Gabe’s audition seminar, I emailed the personnel manager asking for comments on my audition and got some very helpful comments from the principal bassoon, as well as finding out that I had been short just one vote to advance. All in all it was an excellent experience. I don’t think I would want to do an audition in the middle of a summer program like that again, but I’m certainly glad I did this time. My next audition (after the ensemble placement audition at school) will be for the Niagara Symphony in mid-September!