Bruckner - an unexpected pleasure

The season begins! First concert features Bruckner Symphony #4, "The Romantic" (1878-80), which is an indulgently long, warm work that grows on you! While it may lack the fire and wildness of Mahler or Strauss, you just have to sit back a little and enjoy the "landscape" slowly passing by, the wonderful evolution of the harmonies, the occasional asides into Viennese tenderness, and of course the remarkable glow of the big brass writing. Sublime. And a good excuse to use my Powell Grenadilla flute; just the right colors!

The concert will be Sunday, Sept. 18th, at 5pm at the C.C.B. in Lisbon, and features the much more modern Lutoslawski Cello Concerto (1970) with Johannes Moser as soloist on the first half of the concert. I'm looking forward to working on that tomorrow—playing the piece, and hearing some wonderful cello playing! Two very complimentary/contrasting works to make a very balanced program—a great start to the season! Lutoslawski in black and white; Bruckner in color—

Gabrieli for flutes!

Here's the link to another video from the Summer Flute Academy, with the most incredibly beautiful music by Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612). It is rare to find pre-baroque music on a flute program, but the loss is definitely ours!

This "Canzon" in 8 voices features two groups of 4 players, facing each other from opposing sides of the room in this performance. Had we had the luck to "beam ourselves" to St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, Italy, where Gabrieli was the chief composer, the design of the church with its opposing choir lofts would have amplified the antiphonal effect. Gabrieli was famous for using the spectacular acoustics of St. Mark's to the benefit of his compositions. These influenced early Baroque composers such as Schütz and indirectly Bach, bringing the Italian style into the German high-Baroque. More globalization!

Congratulations to the Academy students who performed—it was a joy to hear live, and a joy to hear again through the magic of YouTube!

Master Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli, with lute

Low Flutes: Purcell Redux

For the Professors' Recital on the first day of the Summer Flute Academy, I got a chance to perform a contrabass flute duo with Stephanie Wagner, and Jonathan Ayerst on piano. This was a sort of second baptism of my new Eva Kingma Contrabass Flute, which is as fun to play as it is cool to look at! (At the 1st Summer Flute Academy I played 3 notes on Stephanie's Contra and it was love…what can I say?)

We played an adaptation I wrote for contrabass flute duo and piano of the famous aria "Dido's Lament" from Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas". Gloriously noble, sad music. I thank Stephanie for playing the harder part, and Jon for being the top-notch "backup band". Soon I hope we'll have all our Academy videos online—I'll let you know here as soon as they're up—but for now here's a photo! 

Two Kingma Contrabass Flutes at the 4th Summer Flute Academy

ESART! Scene+Symmetry

While having lunch back in June at ESART, two percussion students set up for an impromptu concert in the bar, and I couldn't resist photographing the beautiful symmetry of the two performers, José Silva and Francisco Viera, and the staircase above echoing their marimbas. 

The music was a delight, energetic but entrancing, and extremely well-played. We all dream of large, important halls, but sometimes the greatest pleasure and impact for the listener is in a more intimate, not to mention unexpected location. We all should remember this power of music, and that it exists any time we play, not just in "big" concerts. A concert is the size we make it!

Impromptu percussion recital at ESART — bravo, José Silva and Francisco Viera!