Lake Union Civic Orchestra, April 8th
Hi friends!
The first installment of this newsletter is about my upcoming concert with the Lake Union Civic Orchestra. For those of you who don't know about LUCO, we're a community orchestra, and we're pretty good for a bunch of people with day jobs, which we mostly are. We rehearse once a week in a Parks Department warehouse that has a bunch of weird sculptures and exercise equipment stored in the back.
I'm sitting right at the edge of the stage for this one, so if you want to get a good view of me rocking out in an orchestra and totally not falling off into the audience, this is a good concert to come to.
This particular concert has a theme, which is dance music. We're playing three pieces:
GRIEG Symphonic DancesThe first installment of this newsletter is about my upcoming concert with the Lake Union Civic Orchestra. For those of you who don't know about LUCO, we're a community orchestra, and we're pretty good for a bunch of people with day jobs, which we mostly are. We rehearse once a week in a Parks Department warehouse that has a bunch of weird sculptures and exercise equipment stored in the back.
I'm sitting right at the edge of the stage for this one, so if you want to get a good view of me rocking out in an orchestra and totally not falling off into the audience, this is a good concert to come to.
This particular concert has a theme, which is dance music. We're playing three pieces:
This is a set of dances that is a variation on a theme. It doesn't get played very often- it's usually passed over in favor of something more famous that Grieg write, like the Peer Gynt suite. The main musical challenge with any theme-and-variations is to make the variations stay interesting until the end of the piece, and this is no exception. It does have some very pretty moments, including some lovely string melodies.
ARNOLD Four Scottish Dances
I always have fun playing Malcolm Arnold; I like him a lot. You movie aficionados might like him, because he wrote and arranged the soundtrack to The Bridge on the River Kwai, and he did it in TEN DAYS. This suite is generally fun and lively and legitimately funny in some places. Chair-dancing recommended. If you like this one, he also wrote Cornish, Irish and Welsh dances, just so nobody felt left out.
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7
You may be wondering what this is doing on a dance program, seeing as how it's a symphony, for crying out loud, and 'dance' isn't in the title anywhere. The thing is that Beethoven very often specified tempo markings for his pieces, and they very often seem ludicrously fast, so fast that they are often ignored. But if you play fast Beethoven movements at the speed he wanted, they sparkle and dance and fly -- and because he was so good at writing music, it's playable, even at such speeds. If you ignore his metronome markings and go slower, the music can plod and bog down and mire and be miserable and boring. The 7th Symphony is one of the more extreme examples of this tendency. We're going to try and show you what it is to make Beethoven dance. This is one of his best works, and I'd have a hard time choosing a favorite movement from it.
The concert is on Saturday, April 8th, at 7:30 pm. The 75 goes right by the concert venue, so that's nice. You can get tickets here in advance, if that's your thing, or you can buy them at the door.
Thanks for reading, and most of all, thank you for subscribing! I'm happy to be writing to you.
Melinda
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