if it wasn’t for peter and the wolf nobody would know what an oboe is either
Until early August you can watch and listen to Aho’s Oboe Concerto for free. Or so I’ve read. I’ve yet to try it out, but I do hope to do so soon.
Here’s a bit of it from YouTube:
Guillaume Connesson: Sextuor for clarinet, oboe, violin, viola, bass and piano
Interpreted by Paul Meyer, François Meyer, Arnaud Vallin, Dominique Lobet, Dominique Desjardins and Eric Le Sage
Directed by Stéphan Aubé
1. dyanmique
2. nocturne:
3. festif:
Learning to be an oboe player..God help me & everyone else in hearing distance!!
(Thanks, dk!)
This oboe driven theme is making me believe in the power of the film score as the great unseen character.
Want to keep your mind healthy and sharp throughout your life? Pick up an instrument. A new study found that musicians might have brains that function better than their peers well into old age. Bet you wish you stuck with those piano lessons after all.
Researchers tested the mental abilities of senior citizens and discovered that musicians performed better at a number of tests. In particular, musicians excelled at visual memory tasks. While musicians had similar verbal capabilities to non-musicians, the musicians’ ability to memorize new words was markedly better, too. Perhaps most importantly, the musicians’ IQ scores were higher overall than those who spent their lives listening to music rather than performing it.
Yep. We’re smarter than your average bare … um … I mean … bear.
actually heard a double reed quartet on the classical station today! It almost made me miss the oboe d’amore…almost.
Yet another pop artist moving into the “classical” world …
Karen O, the vocalist for the New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is swapping her microphone for classical music instruments.
The singer-songwriter is collaborating with the playwright Adam Rapp on what is being dubbed as a “psycho-opera”.
It will debut in New York in October.The opera has yet to have a title but has been described as “an assault on the tragic joys of youth”.
It is being produced by the Studio, which is a new initiative launched by arts and technology group the Creators Project.
O, who also wrote the music for the cult Spike Jonze film Where the Wild Things Are, joins a growing band of popstars who are making the crossover into classical music and the world of stage.
Blur’s Damon Albarn recently wrote an opera based on the Elizabethan polymath Dr John Dee, while U2 wrote the music for the Spider-man musical, which is currently rocking Broadway.
This is a South Indian instrument. The YouTube info says it is “not unlike a clarinet” but, considering the sound, it seems closer to an oboe.
Norwalk Symphony or American Idol? You Help Pick the Conductor
In the final round of three interviews for conductor of the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra, the board of directors and selection committee will let them conduct the symphony Monday and judge their presence before a crowd, who will fill out forms to give theirIt will be a bit like the “American Idol” TV program at Norwalk Concert Hall on Monday night as the audience hears and then votes on each of three candidates for conductor and gives its opinions in forms that will be handed in to symphony officials by the end of the night.
The results will be tallied and will be a part of the decision on which one to hire, said Emil Albanese, president of the board of governors.
(Yes, there really is a missing word in the top paragraph. At least when I did the cut & paste.)
I understand wanting community involvement, and of course there’s nothing wrong with letting them think they have a say, just to get them to feel even more connection to their community’s orchestra, but really … do you think a general audience should have a voice in choosing a conductor?
Me? I think I should get to sit in on interviews for the auto mechanics who work on my car. Um. Right. And maybe doctors, too. Heck, I drive a car. And I go to the doctor. I think I know who would be best for the jobs!
Okay, okay, I’ll stop being snarky. There are tons of good and bad conductors out there and I’m sure a lot of people can tell the good from the bad. Most of the time.
Not too late to start my almost-patented “Get them to learn the oboe and go on scholarship” program
I’m sorry to have to report that the composer, Ketzel, has died. As you can see by the dates above, she was only 19.
Oh yes, she was also a cat.
Ketzel (“cat” in Yiddish) was a one-hit wonder among composers — she never wrote another piece. And her career was launched only because she launched herself onto the keyboard of Professor Cotel’s Baldwin grand one morning in 1996.
He was playing a prelude and fugue from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” by Bach, as he did every morning — he worked his way through a different prelude and fugue each day, as a kind of warmup exercise.
On the morning in question, Ketzel leapt onto the piano, landing in the treble. She worked her way down to the bass. Professor Cotel was startled, but grabbed a pencil and started transcribing. He was impressed by the “structural elegance” of what he heard, Ms. Cheskis-Cotel said. “He said, ‘This piece has a beginning, a middle and an end. How can this be? It’s written by a cat.’”
I LOVE this paragraph:
We gave the piece serious consideration because it was quite well written,” Guy Livingstone, one of the judges, said in 1997. “It reminded us of Anton Webern. If Webern had a cat, this is what Webern’s cat would have written.”
