Well, okay then. I don’t get it, but I’m just an oboe player.
I dunno. When I play Mozart I’m rarely thinking, “Woo hoo! Salad!” You?
The lights are down, the conductor Valeriy Ovsyanikov is ready on the podium, and…
…silence. Followed by a few gentle rustles. Nobody seemed quite sure what was happening.
Then came the tell-tale shuffles at the back of the pit as the missing players slunk on. Dear reader, unless I am very much mistaken, it was the horn section!
We were sitting too high up to see their faces clearly, but I reckon Hoffnung could have done a good job at imagining them… He could also have conjured exquisitely the expressions of the trumpet players who had to echo the fanfares but sounded suspiciously as if they were laughing as hard as I was.
Ahhh … hoorah for horns! Or not. But ya gotta love it. Sort of. Thanks for the laugh, Ms. Duchen!
And if that wasn’t funny enough, visit this blog and read about that naughty piano that says an “uh-oh” word. Click on THEIR link, and then click on the video of the news segment. It’s pretty bizarre, especially because the station must have decided the naughty word really was being said, since the bleeped out that note. Amazing. Stupidly amazing.
Well … okay … I really don’t cook very well. It’s just the name of a song. But Juan Diego Florez could sing it and mean it.
The dish? “Shrimp a la Pavarotti.”
“I am nervous about the wedding and the concert, because Rigoletto is an opera I’ve never performed,” said Florez, considered by many the successor to Pavarotti, who died last year.
Hmmm. I don’t think he needs to be nervous about the wedding just because he’s not done Rigoletto before. Do you? 😉
Jamie Farr, of MASH and Klinger fame, will be doing opera in Toledo next year. But he’s not singing. The article includes this:
Farr will not be expected to sing a single note. “We had to promise,” Conlin said. The single performance is to be held in the Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle, with a gala celebration set to follow at the Toledo Club.
The Opera? Candide. He’ll be Voltaire, the narrator.
A non-singing role is the only way I could be on stage for an opera too: You’d never want to hear me sing. (I have a low voice, but I’m sure it’s because I don’t know how to use it properly—I’ve never taken a voice lesson, and I wonder if I might have had at least a slightly better voice if I had had one or two. If you know the Roches, I sort of sound like the low-voiced one, only probably not so in tune. The rest of my siblings have wonderful voices. Alas, I’m not gifted like they are.)
But anyway, having only seen Jamie Farr in MASH, I see him narrating in drag. Go figure.
