Just got back from seeing Paolo Pandolfo improvise on the viola da gamba at the London Baroque Festival. He was jaw-droppingly good; I’m not sure I can pick out any of it as the high point — it was all high points! — but if forced, perhaps I could pick on the ciaccona after [...]
(Sorry, couldn’t resist it.)
It’s taken a year to get round to it, but finally I’ve managed to rent a bass viola da gamba and arrange lessons:
One lesson so far, with Liam Byrne; it’s both easier and harder than I was expecting. Easier because the tuning and the frets feel familiar from my teenage years [...]
I’m still sticking to my practice schedule:
20 minutes of a scale, though now I’m playing with a metronome, which is really helping a lot with my rhythm, even when I’m playing other stuff without the metronome (many thanks to my teacher for that advice!). How To Practise has posted a great list of reasons to [...]
We were looking at the website of the Retrospect Ensemble (previously known as the King’s Consort) and noticed that their recordings are to be published by Linn Records, a Glasgow-based record label.
It looks like Linn publish some great artists as well as Retrospect, but what’s particularly exciting is that they offer much higher-quality downloadable music [...]
This is a “timed” post: if all goes well, it will automatically appear shortly after we get married.
I thought it would be nice to share the programme of music we’re using for our wedding — all Baroque, of course!
Arrival of the Bride
Bach: Cantata, BWV 207a, 1st Movement, March
A Welcome from the Registrar
Purcell: “Welcome to all [...]
Sorry for the lack of posts recently! It’s because the two authors of this blog will be becoming Mr and Mrs Baroque Project this coming Saturday, and planning/organising the whole thing has sapped valuable blogging energy.
We have lots of ideas for posts, and should be back up and running late next week.
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Posted 30 April 2009
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Something (very) pre-Baroque:
Powerful grid computing has revived a stringed musical instrument that was last played in ancient Greece, Italian researchers announced at a recent conference in Catania, Sicily.
Called an epigonion after the 6th century B.C. musician Epigonus of Ambracia, the instrument was somewhat similar to a modern harp.
The researchers’ website has a page with samples [...]
If you search for something on Twitter, you get the option to subscribe to an RSS feed for that search term — which means that you can get alerted every time someone mentions something on Twitter. This can be fun; here’s what I’ve learned:
Lots of people Twitter every piece of music they listen to. I’m [...]
Nicholas Kenyon has a great article in last Friday’s Guardian about the slow revival of Handel’s operas since the 1920s, after their near abandonment just before his death:
They were thought impractical, trapped in the outdated form of the opera seria. Only in the 20th century did the German Handel revival crank into gear with versions [...]
This post is a bit off-topic and non-Baroque, and is doubtless old hat for experienced muscians, but might be interesting for fellow adult learners of the cello, especially anyone who’s found themselves stuck after a year or so.
I’ve been learning the cello for 16 months now, and had recently reached one of those irritating blocking [...]