oboeinsight

I so enjoyed our guest conductor (every conductor is a guest at Symphony SIlicon Valley, by the way!), Giampaolo Bisanti. He was great to work with, and I’d love to see him return. Everyone I talked to in the orchestra agreed. I’m not sure, though, that he’ll be available to us in the future; he is on the rise … ah well … we can all say we worked with him at least this one time!

Saturday night’s concert went quite well, and Sunday’s even better. Yours truly made one little error in the Schubert on opening night that ruined her evening, of course. Some people noticed, some didn’t. But of course most (but even there not all) colleagues noticed, and one even commented the next day right before our second concert which sort of threw me a bit. Ah well. We all do our best, yes? It’s not as if we try to have brain freezes. Mostly my part was quite insignificant and this was a stress free week for me; I needed that!

The Merc review is out and it’s quite favorable. Here are just a few quotes that make me happy, due to colleagues getting well deserved mentions:

As guest conductor Giampaolo Bisanti took his bows Saturday night at the California Theatre, applause surged through the house — and through the ranks of Symphony Silicon Valley. Nearly all the orchestra’s members clapped and stamped their feet in appreciation of Bisanti, and its principal trumpeter, James F. Dooley, pointing at the conductor, shouted, “You the man!”

Gee … did Jim really do that?! Fun! (Jim sits behind me so I can’t see what he’s doing, but I do know he loved Bisanti.)

Bisanti led a performance of radiance and charm, and the key was soloist Meredith Brown, the orchestra’s principal horn.
Her tone was haunting, with round plummy low notes and assured upper notes — a good thing, as Mozart demands nimbleness across a wide range in his opening movement. In the stately second movement, she and the orchestra phrased the themes with comfort, as Brown again climbed from basement to tower.

he concert’s second half began with Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” Overture, which had good thrumming energy in the strings and delicate wind work from bassoonist Deborah Kramer and clarinetist Michael Corner.

The players were with him from the outset, though the unity of the performance became doubly clear in the second movement, with its glowing strings — and Corner yet again playing a lilting solo and bringing the Allegretto to a whispered finish. The third movement, a minuet, included a deliciously lacy duet between bassoonist Kramer and principal oboe Pamela Hakl, amid ripe strings.

So woo hoo to all of my colleagues, and especially to Pam, Debbie and Mike … they really did sound fantastic!

When is a review not a review, I wonder?

Does this qualify?

Last Friday Carpenter made his way Upstate from his home in New York City for a concert at Ithaca College. Unfortunately, I had to do my own gig in the Big Apple that same day. Perhaps Carpenter and I passed each other on I-81 in the Poconos. I imagined him in a brilliant white Volkswagen Bug glittering with sequins racing through the still-brown hills, but there was nothing even close to that level of flash and dash on the interstate. Perhaps this revolutionary was transported to his destination in a sealed car.
While I’ve already admitted that I wasn’t even at the concert, I offer this virtual review of Carpenter’s Ithaca appearance, or better a report on its reception among a pair of music lovers dear to my heart: my two daughters, Elizabeth and Cecilia, ages ten and twelve respectively. They’d been taken to the concert by their mother, Annette Richards, the Cornell University organist. It is from children that the truth, musical or otherwise, is most likely to emerge. They’ve heard recitals and services by their parents on organs across North America and Europe, from the electronic travesty in the Christian Science church at the bottom of our street to the great Silberman organ from 1755 in the Catholic Cathedral in Dresden.
Call it a new genre: the review by hearsay.
On my return to Ithaca on Saturday I got home just as the kids were getting back from a walk with the dog. I asked them about the concert. They’d seen the YouTube clip a couple of times and from it had gained a sense of the Carpenter persona. So on the evening of the concert they were disappointed to see Carpenter greeting concertgoers at the entrance to the hall not in his trademark white body suit but in black t-shirt and jeans. But they liked the idea of meeting the virtual virtuoso beforehand in the flesh. Indeed, the disappointment at seeing him in somber black only made his eventual appearance on the stage a few minutes later in his concert rig all the more exciting.

RTWT