How it went yesterday

Yesterday, of course, being the concert
I’ve been telling you about for a couple of months.

The short answer is, pretty well. There were about 50 people, including 6 who came
because we told them to. They seemed happy — we felt completely
justified in doing our encore. I thought we lost them a bit in the
middle, but there weren’t any loud snores and they came back for the
end. I didn’t have any disruptive coughing fits, and although there
were some flubs, we didn’t completely lose it at any point.

We did take some pictures, but I don’t have them yet, because
they’re on someone else’s camera. I’ll probably get several
daily posts out of snippets from the recording, so today I’ll
just give you the one that has the best recorder playing on
it.

It’s the Ricercada
Primera by Diego Ortiz. I’m playing my G alto recorder by
Ralph Netch. I decided last summer that I needed to get more
comfortable on it, so I spent the whole summer playing English
Country Dances on it, both using C fingerings and using G
fingerings, which involve playing up into the third octave.
The bass line is played by Ishmael Stefanov on his 5-stringed
fiddle by Alan Carruth.

I started working on this piece last September, when we’d first
scheduled the concert. I asked my recorder teacher what solo
recorder piece he’d recommend for a concert like this (we didn’t
of course know very much about the actual program then), and
this was what he suggested.

If I’d been using the 465 body, I’d have hit the low G, and I
was hitting it most of the time in rehearsal on the 440 body,
but I flubbed it in actual performance. But otherwise, this is
the kind of Renaissance recorder playing I’m capable of these
days. A year ago there would have been a lot more unintended
spaces and forced (and therefore sharp) high notes.