“Sometimes you hear the flute in wind ensembles, where it goes bong-qia-bong-qia, a bit like circus music,” said Tseng, a teacher and performance flautist who studied under Andrea Wild and Claus-Christian Schuster at the City of Vienna University.
“Or you hear the flute in unaccompanied pieces, which usually focus on displaying technique and go hua-la-la-la-la, up and down and up and down.”
So you think classical music is purely a rarefied pursuit, where what matter are creativity, spirit and soul? The musician’s body does not agree.
Not midway through a high-powered symphony. Not sitting near the crashing cymbals in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Not during the long haul of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.
Take violinist David Harrington. He was in rehearsals with his adventurous Kronos Quartet, preparing to play the epic String Quartet No. 2 by Morton Feldman — it notoriously spans six hours without intermission. Just continuous playing through what seems like a universe of time.
“We’d already done eight performances of the piece, and this 1996 concert at Lincoln Center was to be our last outing with it,” he said by phone from San Francisco.
But pains started shooting up and down his arm 40 minutes into rehearsal. They grew more and more alarming.
“Finally, after several hours of rehearsal, the pain was excruciating,” he said. “We ended up canceling this last and most famous venue for the work.”
My colleagues can certainly relate. I’ve been blessed — only once did I encounter major issues (with a hand) and it was actually due to computer use.
I read about this movie here.
… because this looks like a pretty nice place to be.
As the play opens, Josh Kornbluth’s so-called personal trainer comes onstage to announce his entrance: “Josh has made a living telling stories about things he failed to do.”
“Sea of Reeds,” the locally renowned monologuist’s latest work, was commissioned by Shotgun Players. Kornbluth, a Berkeley resident, has written and performed in six live monologues and three major filmed works prior to “Reeds.” Similar to “Red Diaper Baby” (one of his filmed works) and “Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?” (one of his staged works), his latest production touches amusingly on his semi-Communist upbringing and exploration into the Jewish faith.
The title of the production is a play on words that refers to both the reed used to play the oboe and the biblical Sea of Reeds (better known as the Red Sea) crossed by Moses and the Israelites. Drawing on both, “Sea of Reeds” is an obtuse nonmonologue monologue of sorts that tells of Kornbluth’s recent religious journey in finding his Jewish faith — with a little bit of oboe-playing thrown in.
A friend of mine (hi, Janet!) wrote to me about this. She really enjoyed it, and I’m still hoping to make it here, although time is running out. Maybe this week? Hmm.
So I had to teach an Oboe player Cymbals today Cymbal ppl, I have so much Respect for you! My stomach is Bruised. Cymbals Love 🙂
