Westerville Concert Band 5/16

This concert featured Trumpet soloist Scott Belck, a professor of trumpet at Capital University. We did a piece called Rose Variations and also La Virgen de Macarena. He was a remarkable performer, as good as anyone I've been around in twenty years.

Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra 5/9

This concert by the Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra of Columbus opened with a "Scene" from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. That was followed by the fourth movement of Mahler's Seventh Symphony (the expanded MCO is no longer a chamber orchestra) and Beethoven's Romance for Violin and Orchestra. The soloist, Erin Gilliland, performed it beautifully, and it was a privilege have her be a part of our performance. After the intermission, we opened with Beethoven's Overture to Fidelio followed by the inner two movements of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. The Mahler was a pretty heavy piece, but the audience responded quite well to it. Kudos to all the extras were asked to take part in this performance. Everything went well with the relatively few rehearsals we had with this community orchestra.

Clintonville Community Band (3/21)

I couldn't make it to this program until intermission due to a conflict with work. I was told that Holst's First Suite went well. The second half of the program featured Flourishes and Variants by Barry Kopetz and an arrangement of a Mozart opera overture. They both went pretty well. The Kopetz work was very difficult, with lots of busy writing. The horn part looked like a woodwind part and there wasn't much space to breathe. The main concern for me was to get the solo right. It wasn't perfect, but it was good technically which sufficed.

Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra of Columbus (2/28)

This concert, at Central Presbyterian Church, featured three works. The first was a string piece by Bach, the third Brandenburg Concerto. That's probably my favorite of the six Brandenburgs and I enjoyed it very much. After that, the full orchestra did one of the night music movements of Mahler's Seventh Symphony. It seems odd for an orchestra of about fifty musicians to do this piece but it seemed to work OK. Mahler is one of those late romantic composers who was bent on creating the Greatest Masterpieces in the History of Civilization and the work seems bloated and excessive to me. But certainly he was a very skilled composer and there are plenty of gorgeous moments in this movement. The concert concluded with three dances from Manuel DeFalla's ballet score, The Three Cornered Hat. It is an unusual piece and it was awkward to play. The final dance, as DeFalla called it, had plenty of energy and was my favorite of the three.

Cardinal Health Chamber Orchestra 1/28

I was summoned to be a substitute horn for this gig at Northwood Elementary School in the northern edge of Marysville, Ohio. We did Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf for the schoolkids. They are a pretty good orchestra and the performance went well. The kids seemed to enjoy it.

Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra 12/16

We did Rossini's Barber of Seville Overture, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with Ariane Sletner, soloist, Schubert's 5th Symphony and the last movement of Ravel's Rhapsodie Espanol.

Westerville Concert Band 11/1

This performance featured Alfred Reed's "Festive Overture", fondly remembered from my high school days in the late '70s. We also did Jack Stamp's "Chorale and Toccata" which we struggled with through the rehearsals but it seemed to go ok in the performance. Special mention goes to the woodwind section for its performance of an arrangement of the "Royal Fireworks Music". The Bouree was, for me, the highlight of the concert. A somber piece, Robert Spittal's "Pacem - A Hymn for Peace" was also done. When done well as it was in a performance shown on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURSI4Ua3hQ it is a captivating piece. In my view, we never seemed to get it. The piece is launched by short solos in the trumpet and horn and takes off from there. The solos weren't good and we didn't recover, though the performance as a whole wasn't terrible. We also did a few lighter pieces - show tunes, marches, jazzy things, etc. which went pretty well.