Langtree Sinfonia

Langtree Sinfonia performed on Saturday evening at Wallingford in a church called St Mary le More. We have not played there before, and it was really nice venue. It is surprisingly modern inside, having recently been refurbished, and the lighting is excellent, given that there was plenty of light to read our music, but no glaring light fittings to distract people. The acoustic worked quite well and there was a really good ambience in the place.

The programme was good, with diverse pieces of the orchestral repertoire:

• Dvořák - Czech Suite
• Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending, Soloist: Sharon Warnes
• Haydn - Aria “On Mighty Pens” from The Creation, Soloist: Bethany Cox
• Schubert - 2nd Symphony

The concert opened with the Czech Suite, five movements that have dance themes in them, with trumpets only in the final movement. This was followed by an excellent rendition of The Lark Ascending. The orchestra accompanied very well, supporting without overshadowing the soloist who played with tremendous feeling and skill. It worked really well in the intimate atmosphere of this small venue. Next came the soprano solo from The Creation, with Bethany singing with great expression and feeling. It was a beautiful performance. Finally, we performed the Schubert Symphony, and the trumpets could rejoin the orchestra having sat out for the quiet pieces.

It was a great way to spend a Saturday, having spent part of the afternoon rehearsing and preparing. I am looking forward to the Spring programme.

Reading Festival

This year's festival was quite interesting, because most of the headline acts were not to my taste. The line-up was quite disappointing when it first came out, but then every year, different people are delighted or disappointed depending on their tastes, but with so many bands over three days across six stages, there is always something to enjoy.

On Friday, the highlights for me were on the smallers stages, especially the "BBC Introducing..." stage. For example, Our Fold are a new band from Bolton, and their guitarist was really good, having joined them from Stone Roses. Skints, on the Lockup Stage were an excellent London reggae band with flute/saxophone. Mr Fogg, Blood Red Shoes, LCD Soundsystem were also excellent bands.

On the Saturday, I had been looking forward to Modest Mouse, Maccabees, Villagers, Black Angels and Pendulum and lots of sunshine after a rainy start to the festival. The weather was fine, but Modest Mouse and Maccabees were not interesting. Black Angels were really good, like 1970s psychelic rock mixed with Spiritualized. Enter Shikari were funny, but not much music. I loved Hadouken's lyric in Get Smashed, Gatecrash - "welcome to our world, we are the wasted youth, we are the future too". Imagine 10,000 kids chanting that. But there were lots of really poor bands on Saturday. In fact, we went to the pub for a couple of pints of real beer while we waited for the kids to finish watching what they wanted to see.

Sunday was more promising. and didn't disappoint. In fact, it was an excellent day out. The weather was mostly dry, with a couple of showers. I really enjoyed Peers, Holy F**k, Fool's Gold (with a conga!), Four Tet, Kele (better without the rest of Bloc Party), Foals and Caribou. It was a good end to what turned out to be a great festival, even though the headline acts were such a disappointment.

What probably made most of the difference was checking out all the unknown acts on YouTube first, so that I had some idea about which stages to go to at what time. It was much better having an idea about what would be worth seeing and what would be worth missing. The only thing I would change about the festival is the beer. They get sponsorship from a certain brewery, I guess, and the result is that there is only one kind of beer available on site, Tuborg, which almost undrinkable. Everything for sale on the site is ridiculously expensive, of course, and rarely justifies the price. But even so, the event is such a strong sensory experience of all kinds, it makes a complete break from the daily grind and is an excellent way to spend a few days. It helps that it is only two miles from home, too.

Orchestras

On Saturday, I got a call from one of the orchestras I play with occasionally. I was invited to an orchestral workshop all day on Sunday, and had the great pleasure of working through Tchaikovsky's 1st Symphony, which was unknown to me until then. That was a good day out, and a welcome break from the pressures of work, although quite tiring. Now, I am trying to remember the various commitments to orchestras that are lined up over the next few weeks, and this is as good a place as any to keep a list:

• Reading Youth Orchestra: Sunday 21 March - Rossini: Tancredi Overture, Saint-Saens: Cello Concerto No. 1 (Soloist: Oliver Howell, RYO Principal), Haydn: Symphony no. 104 (London Symphony) - Venue: Christ Church, Henley-on-Thames.
  
• Crowthorne Symphony Orchestra: Saturday 27 March - Malcolm Arnold: Little Suite No. 1, Chabrier: España, Max Bruch: Kol Nidrei (Soloist: Jennie Brown), Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 - Venue: The Old Gym, Wellington College, Crowthorne
  
• Langtree Sinfonia: Sunday 9th May 2010 - Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela, Schumann: Piano concerto (Soloist: Nils Franke), Schumann: 3rd Symphony - Venue: Dorchester Abbey
  

You'd be most welcome to pop along and see any of these performances. There will probably be tickets on sale at the door. Let me know if you want to come and listen!

Crowthorne Symphony Orchestra

Monday evening is the weekly rehearsal for Crowthorne Symphony Orchestra. This evening's rehearsal was the first for two weeks. It was also the AGM, an annual meeting where the committee reports on the previous year's progress and think about the coming year. Things seem to be moving in a positive direction. Last year's concerts were very challenging for us, and as the orchestra gets better, the music gets harder! The orchestra is in good shape, by all accounts. Our recurring difficulty is getting sufficient violin players. But the continual throughput of people means that the orchestra is constantly changing. However, there are sufficient stalwarts to provide a sense of continuity and consistency. The orchestra has been going since 1991, since when it has been through a couple of name changes.

Our next concert will be Sunday 20th December, where we'll be playing Beethoven's Egmont Overture, Sibelius' Finlandia, Weber's Clarinet Concertino and Schumann's Symphony No. 4. Two of these pieces, the Weber and the Schumann, are new to me. They are shaping up well, and the more we play them, the clearer they become in terms of structure, shape and ensemble. The Sibelius and the Beethoven are well-known, excellent pieces. It promises to be a good concert!

Langtree Sinfonia

Recently I started rehearsing with another orchestra, the Langtree Sinfonia, at the invitation of a friend of mine who had helped out with his trumpet at one of my Crowthorne Orchestra performances last year. Langtree Sinfonia takes its name from the School where it rehearses, having been set up there a few decades ago as an adult education class that developed into a permanent ensemble. It is interesting just how many of the community orchestras and bands started this way.

This evening we had a concert in the beautiful Dorchester Abbey which is about 19 miles North of my house. The programme was fairly standard, an overture, a concerto and a symphony:

• Rossini - The Barber of Seville overture
• Beethoven - Violin concerto - Soloist: Todor Nikolaev
• Sibelius - 1st symphony

After assembling with our instruments for a formal orchestra photo, we started the concert at 7 pm. The overture was nothing special, just a warm up to get everyone going, really. The Violin Concerto had been somewhat dull in the rehearsals. Naturally we did not have the soloist with us, so it was lacking in that key aspect. Even in the play-through in the afternoon, the soloist did not play the cadenzas, which have no orchestra backing, so I was not prepared for anything special from him. However, his main cadenza was quite long, but incredibly musical and very dexterous. It was a real pleasure to be a part of that. But for me the real highlight was the Sibelius 1st Symphony. This is a marvellous piece of music, and this was the first time we had played it with timps, trombones and tuba. I have got to know the symphony very well over the last few months in rehearsals, so it was a tremendous experience playing through the whole of it. Naturally, one or two of us got lost, particular one climactic section where all we could hear from where I sat was the timps bashing away so loud that we lost our place. But it all came together at the end in a huge climax, with the sounds resounding around the old abbey. What a great evening.

Next time I might bring some people along to listen, if they can make it to such an out of the way place in the Oxfordshire countryside.

Trumpets

Having accepted an impromptu invitation to make up a foursome for a trumpet quartet, standing in for an absent member, I had a pleasant couple of hours blowing on Friday evening. After running through several well-known tunes arranged for 3-4 trumpets, the conductor of their band, who happens to be the conductor of my orchestra, arrived and we spent an enjoyable half an hour or so working on a difficult and complex piece that they are rehearsing in their band. Saturday morning saw the first rehearsal of the new term for the Saturday Morning Orchestra. The usual conductor was not well, and the deputy conductor was not available, so we had a deputy deputy conductor who coped rather well under the circumstances, being the first play through of the pieces we had. We creaked and struggled our way through Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and Mendelsohn's Violin Concerto. It'll get better, I'm sure...

Abd alah Helmey

I bought three music CDs when I was in Dubai not long ago, and they are all excellent. I found a disc by Nazem Al-Ghazali, an accomplished and celebrated Iraqi singer, who died in 1963. This is an evocative, vibrant recording of a concert that seems to have featured some of his greatest songs, judging by the enthusiastic reception of the audience to each new piece. The next disc was also Iraqi music, Munir Bashir and Omar Bashir, playing duets on the 'Ud, a traditional Arabic stringed instrument that is the predecessor of the western lute. This is beautiful music played by real masters of the art. The final disc was Egyptian. Taksim Kawala 3, by Abd alah Helmey. This is incredibly beautiful traditional music played on a wooden flute, but it is very difficult to find out anything about the music or the performer. The real problem with this CD is that the disc pressing is not very good, and the CD skips in the final two tracks, which makes it unplayable past that point. And the worst of it is that although I can find the recording on the internet from the people who made the disc, they only sell it in Egypt! I'll have to wait until I get another visit that way, unless anyone can bring me one back from their next visit...

Crowthorne Orchestra

Our Spring Concert well. Although I only brought 9 of the audience, there was a good crowd in the Old Gym at Wellington College. We played several pieces:

• Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No.1, Op.46
• Dvorak: The Noon Witch, Op.108
• Leopold Mozart: Sinfonia Pastorella for Alphorn and String Orchestra
• Mussorgsky: Night on the Bare Mountain
• Smetana: The Moldau (Vltava) from Ma Vlast
• Khachaturian: Spartacus Ballet Suite No.2

and they all went very well indeed. I was particularly pleased with the Mussorgsky and the Smetana, both big pieces with plenty of trumpet to play. It was a real thrill to be playing such powerful and well-known music. I also really enjoyed getting to know Dvorak's Noon Witch, a piece I had never come across before, but it has really grown on me.

The audience were suitably amazed by the carbon fibre, telescopic Alphorn played by Frances Jones who explained how the real ones are made (and how heavy they are, being wooden and three metres long) and played a few solo pieces before playing her solo with the orchestra in Leopold Mozart's Sinfonia Pastorella. As there are no parts for brass in this piece, I was able to join the audience and see this part of the performance from the front, which was excellent.

This concert included some quite ambitious music for us, but the next one is even more ambitious, Sibelius Symphony No 2 in D Minor, one of my all-time favourite symphonies. I am really looking forward to playing that!

Test Department

Today I was rediscovering Test Dept, a UK group from the 1980s who used large pieces of metal, assorted hammers, buzz-saws and so on to create a mesmeric industrial sound that was hugely original at the time, and ultimately lead to the whole "industrial music" scene I guess. They still sound good to me. Check them out here. I always appreciate musicians who are sensitive the economic and political context of their music. Too much music is de-contextualized and lacks meaning. This stuff might not be to everyone's taste, but at least you can see where they are coming from! This is not sugar-coated, over-produced, escapist pap. I wonder what happened to these guys. The bass player from one incarnation of the group is Vic Reeves, and he's been quite successful with his surreal brand of knockabout comedy.

Presumably this would be called performance art these days, and I guess that anyone making this kind of noise these days would create the sounds with synthesizers and sampling, rather than smashing real lumps of metal with huge great hammers! They were good.

Saturday morning orchestra

Feeling that I was not getting enough time to play my trumpet, I accepted the invitation of a fellow trumpet player, Dave Johnson, to tag along to another orchestra. This one is quite handy as it rehearses exactly the same time, as the orchestra in which my son plays double bass, and just across the road. Since he needs taking and collecting every Saturday morning anyway, it is very convenient for me to join in. I took part for the first time today, and they were a very friendly bunch. Not too bad at sight reading. The timps and harp parts were put in by a guy on a keyboard with an amp, which was novel. We worked through Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, McCunn's Land of the Mountain and Flood, and Wagner's Prelude from Tristan und Isolde. Not much for the trumpets in this latter one, but enough to keep us busy in the other two pieces. This also gives ma an opportunity to use my new trumpets because each piece demands a different instrument. Indeed, the Wagner starts with an F trumpet and then changes to an E trumpet, neither of which I have! However, Dave had a useful tip. Using the C Trumpet, the transposition is pretty straightforward because the key signature is obvious. It's good to be practicing and learning more!

Crowthorne Symphony Orchestra

Our concert went very well. It was all a bit touch and go, though. One of the viola players cried off at the last minute with flu, and even the piano soloist was feeling too ill to come to the afternoon rehearsal, so the conductor had to rehearse the orchestra without the soloist, which is not easy in a piano concerto. In fact, it is unheard of! To deal with this strange situation, the conductor and soloist agreed that for once, the soloist would follow the conductor, rather than the other way around. We rehearsed the whole programme from 1:30 until 5:30, which was quite am exhausting to do immediately before a concert. But all the brass, the basses, the harp and a large proportion of the violins were brought in just for the day, because we seem to be low on string players these days. It would be unusual to have many brass for all the weekly rehearsals, as there is generally not enough for them to do to keep them occupied. So the rehearsal on the afternoon of the concert is the first time we have played together, and for some instruments, the first time they have seen the pieces. Normally we would not have this many extras on the day, though. My new trumpet was excellent. I played set it up as a D Trumpet for the Cimarosa overture, and as an E flat for the Liszt piano concerto. It sounded good in the acoustic of the hall. The first half went off without mishap, and most people in the audience seemed to enjoy it a lot. After the break came the Symphony, the big piece we had really focused most of our attention on for the preceding 12 weeks. It is a huge and demanding piece, but very absorbing and great fun. It went very well indeed, and was a real success. I'd sold tickets to 23 adults and 6 children for this concert, an unusually large contingent. Although half a dozen of them were unable to attend due to flu or unexpected guests, I still had 24 people in the audience, which made it a very special concert for me. We're all looking forward to the March concert now. I wonder what we'll be playing?

Trumpets

Although the modern trumpet is pitched in the key of B flat, a large proportion of classical music was written when valved trumpets were rare or not yet invented. As a result, much of the music that I play in Crowthorne Orchestra is written for trumpets in different keys. Because our next concert involves two trumpets and two cornets (Franck's 1st Symphny), Dave Johnson, who I used to play next to in Thames Wind Band and Woodley Concert Band, has come to join us temporarily to bump up the trumpet section. He turned up with several trumpets and cornets, and was showing me one that he recently bought on e-bay. This is a trumpet in C that can convert to B flat. It plays well in C, and the sellers appeared to be shifting one of these every day. So I have been joining in the bidding day-by-day, and yesterday I won an auction! For £125 I am getting a new trumpet. This is an incredible price if the instrument plays well, and I am looking forward to its arrival. I guess I won't see it until I get back from Dubai next week.

Toumani Diabaté

I was listening to Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orcestra on CD. I love the way that he plays the Kora. His Symmetric Orchestra consists of people from different cultures and traditions. Their name was chosen because no one style dominates over the others. I love listening to this, and I was reading the sleeve notes again, and read that the Symmetric Orchestra rarely performs outside Mali, but plays every Friday night in Toumani's club in Bamako, Mali's capital. What a shame. The idea of going to see them play, and sit in the club soaking up the atmosphere seemed an impossibility that was hugely appealing, and I was daydreaming about going there to see them, thinking how wonderful it would be, and what a shame I couldn't go there. Then the thought struck me - why not? There are plenty of research active staff and PhD students in West Africa that simply do not have the resources to travel to Universities like mine and get access to resources and staff so that they can develop their research ideas and take part in research seminars. It would probably be useful, as an editor, to engage with these people. Moreover, we recruit many undergraduates and postgraduates from this region. So there are plenty of strong professional reasons for going. And my PhD student, Sam Laryea, from Ghana, is well connected. I discussed it with him, and now we are talking about setting up a visit to Ghana and Mali. A research workshop in Ghana, gathering up people from nearby West African countries, followed by a trip to Mali, would be perfectly plausible. I have the funding for the flights, and Sam has the contacts to arrange the venue and invite the audience. This could be a great trip.