Our faculty recital appears to be happening, as we now have a faculty bassoonist and she is available for the November 6 date. In honor, excitement, and great expectation of this event, I will share this video with you. If our recital gets as much applause as this video (or an audience at all), I will be delighted.
I continue to enjoy the photos of Kelsey and Mel’s wedding, taken by Katy Regnier. She has a wonderful blog too, which right now has some awfully cute babies at the top of the page. (She has twins of her own that are there too, and are incredibly adorable.)
If you live in California (Katy is in SoCal) and need a photographer, I cannot recommend her enough. She does great work. Just check out her site. And right now she has a giveaway contest, too. But it ends Monday, so you have to hop on it pronto!
I like to brag about Dan’s work, but I also want to brag about Katy. Because I think she is absolutely incredible!
(This is a double post, seen both here and at the pattyo. But you knew that, right?)
So I’m not really going to say much about the opera last night; I’m too lazy! But I will tell you about my reed woes.
Why?
Because I like to whine, of course.
When I got to the “pit” (not quite a true pit, really) I readied a bunch of reeds and had to decide which I’d begin with. Obviously it had to be responsive, and in tune is sort of nice, too. I had a number of reeds that felt pretty darn good.
An hour before the opera.
Now I know it’s purely psychological, but the closer I get to downbeat, the worse my reeds tend to feel, and the less responsive they are. Go figure!
But I did find a reed, and I went with it. It really felt great for the first act. I mean … really great! And I thought I’d stick with that reed for act 2.
BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT …
I get back to my seat, and the reed feels entirely completely wholly totally different! Really.
So act 2 was not nearly as enjoyable as act 1.
And that, readers, seems to be the story of my life: if I get comfortable and think I’m gonna be happy, something changes. Could all of this be psychological? I’m guessing yes. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
I just hope the audience couldn’t hear a huge diff. But who knows?
And I do it all again tomorrow. That’s show biz, folks!
A friend and colleague reminded me of Quartetto Gelato yesterday. She hadn’t heard of them, but another colleague was mentioning the death of the oboist, Cynthia Steljes. Such a loss, and such a beautiful player. So I went searching for some of their older videos.
You don’t get to hear her through this entire video, but there isn’t much on YouTube so here you go:
He has such a clear tone, sometimes it sounds like a soprano? sax!
What instrument, you wonder, is this person writing about?
Well … here you go (thanks, David!):
My carpool left San Jose early so we could get dinner up at the same place we bought dinner on Wednesday. Greens has some mighty yummy chili and I was really looking forward to it.
So much for that.
We got there only to find the little “to go” part of Greens isn’t open today. Sigh. So I had a chocolate chip cookie for dinner. How wonderful is that, before playing a 3 1/2 hour opera?
Yeah. About that much fun.
I got back in the door here at 12:50 AM. So this has been one very long time and I’m hungry but of course it’s a very bad idea to eat this late … um … early. Oh well!
The opera went fine. I can’t say I was thrilled with my playing, but I didn’t do anything so horrible I should be shot. So there you go.
