WMV Music Web Log

David Cheng has posted the entire concert of arias etc from last Tuesday at the Ratner Museum as videos on YouTube! I continue to watch them with some pride and amazement that we actually pulled this off, considering that WMV has never done a program like this before. We did a Bach cantata with Gary last year, however, and that went well, so why not opera?

The success of this program convinces me that opera can be performed effectively as chamber music, at least by these singers. This was also accomplished with very modest resources - piano or guitar and one obbligato instrument, clarinet. No string quartet, basso continuo, flute, oboe, or violin - resources we originally thought necessary, but expensive. And best of all, from my point of view, the singers took the lead (with great enthusiasm) in producing the concert. I ended up helping with the myriad administrative things for which they did not have much experience, but I was relieved of a number of the usual tedious production tasks, like arranging rehearsals and figuring out how to introduce the works on the program.

My biggest responsibility was arranging the scores for piano and clarinet, and this turned out not to be trivial. My Sibelius (Sibelius is a music writing program) skills have taken a leap - I can now copy a 4 page score in a couple of hours. The power of this software (among others) is that once a score is typeset, you can play it back on the computer and tinker with it until it sounds the way you want it. It also transposes any obbligato part into clarinet language and prints out a clean part for Ben.

An example: we were unable to schedule a rehearsal for Handel's Cara speme before the concert. However, I copied the score reduction into the computer, arranged the part so that it sounded good on the piano, got Karyn's tempo over the phone, and sent her an mp3 computer realization by email. Can you sing with this, and does it sound OK? Yes, so 20 minutes before the concert we tried it out live, and it sounded good.

The downside was that I had to typeset and arrange most parts of 14 arias, which took me a solid week of full time work.

You know how I-Tunes assigns a commercial name to every bit of music you put into it - coming up with Japanese pop titles for my rehearsal sessions, or albums by hip-hop artists for our concert recordings? It is weird and infuriating.

And sometimes surreal: Apparently Blair Goins' recording of part five of the Nelhybel tuba suite has become a popular cell phone ringtone (downloaded more than 1000 times) through an online source called espew.com; only they think it is a cut from an album by a mega band called Evanescence. Which is pretty strange, since it is just tuba and piano. Weirder and weirder: if you go to Evanescence's website, you can buy ringtones for $2.49!

YouTube is so cool! I just watched Ramón Tasat singing Mozart's "Ah se fosse" at the Ratner - it is very good! Teenagers and 20 somethings are submitting comments on Smetana, Brahms, Mozart, and Handel - miraculous!

Soho the Dog reminds us that it is Liberace's 88th birthday, and has several links to Liberace videos. I was astonished what an amazingly talented musician that guy was. it embarrasses me that we "serious" pianists used to disparage him - he was anything but a fraud. His arrangements are brilliant, and his execution is lively, skillful, sensitive, exciting, and funny. I apologize, Liberace! I also hated it that all the neighborhood kids used to call me "Liberace", but I should have been proud to follow in his footsteps.

If you want to hear a really passionate performance of a Brahms lied, click on this link: http://www.dcmusicaviva.org/recordings/documents/vonewiger.mp3

Karyn Friedman singing Von ewiger Liebe