This was a group of a dozen young professional recorder players who played about two dozen renaissance recorders under the baton of Paul Leenhouts. I thought it was by far the most riveting all-recorder concert I’ve ever heard. Here are some high points:
* The improvisation on Boffons, where Andreas Böhlen walked out into the audience.
* The award for the single most startling chord on the concert, and maybe in the entire festival, goes to the one on the penultimate cadence of the Bach Choral ??Leit uns mit deiner rechten Hand??. I had been thinking that group (seetings of ??Vater unser in himmelreich??) was being very square and German compared to the dance music that had preceded it, and suddenly, it was unsquare and German. Of course the startling quality was possible only because of the impeccable tuning.
* The low quartet playing ??Triste España sin ventura??. Most of the concert had most players playing most of the time, using sizes from soprano or alto to the 10-foot subcontrabass. But this set alternated a low consort (with the top line on C-bass) with a high consort).
I found it inspiring, and I hope the people I play with did too, that the entire concert was performed without written music (except for the conductor). Tom Zajac remarked that that made his 10 minutes of onstage memorized music in the opera seem like child’s play. I’m told a group member said that the hardest part of this was remembering the order of pieces and which of the two dozen recorders you need to pick up.
h3. You too can play this music
We play this stuff all the time, but most of it has fairly good modern editions. The ones on this site are the “Dowland”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#4 group:
* “Lachrimae Antiquae”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/69.html
* “The Earle of Essex Galiard”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/86.html
Both of these will be in ??Lachrimæ, or Seaven Teares figured in seaven passionate pavanes??, to be published soon at the “laymusic lulu.com store”:http://stores.lulu.com/laymusic
h3. And you can see more of the recorders
The “Boston Recorder Society”:http://www.bostonrecordersociety.org will be hosting a special event for their friends and members on Saturday, June 23 from 2-3:30 PM in the Carr Organ Room of the “New England Conservatory”:http://www.newenglandconservatory.edu.
LayMusic.org 