Entry for June 20, 2007 – Music

This evening I went to the occasional West Lodge Orchestra, which meets every six weeks or so. I’d home-worked today, and managed to be late getting there. It’s strange how I can get there on time when I come all the way from Basildon and have to contend with the M25, but end up late when I’m only coming from just around the corner!

We warmed up on Rossini’s overture “Il Signor Bruschino”, which I’d never heard before. Then we moved on to Dvorak’s 5th Symphony, but we were playing off old parts which described it as the 3rd Symphony. I don’t recall having heard that before, either. It took me the whole of the first half of the session to get anywhere near warmed up. My recent lack of practice is starting to tell rather badly.

After the mid-evening break, we finished off the Dvorak 5th Symphony. I had the company of Terry, playing his bass clarinet, in lieu of another bassoonist. Terry is great: he can read bass clef on his bass clarinet. We did swap parts mid-way through the Dvorak, though, as there was a bit he reckoned he’d never play it on his bass clarinet. I found that I couldn’t play it on my bassoon either. (Without taking it home to study.)

We finished the evening off with Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” overture, which was a very pleasant way to finish up.

In the car on the way home, I was listening to ClassicFM as I often do, and they played a really interesting piece which came about because Michael Collins and Mikhail Pletnev thought that it might be possible to play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on the clarinet and they went ahead and did it! It was so interesting that I sat on the driveway listening to it and when I eventually came inside, we switched the TV over to ClassicFM to hear the rest of it.

It’s funny how I quite approved of a piece of violin repertoire being filched for the clarinet, and I don’t mind filching the odd bit of cello repertoire for the bassoon, but I don’t like it very much when string players filch our wind repertoire.