(no subject)

[ricardienne]

So I'm playing in this volunteer "baroque" orchestra, part of the First Family of Alternative Classical Music in the Valley Productions (father conducts, mother sings, 8-year-old son composes, plays the violin, is hyperactively precocious). The orchestra is mostly local music teachers, plus a few retired symphony players. Very retired, I might add. I may have a grand-daughterly crush on the principal violist, who is probably about 90 and a bit hard of hearing, and who always contests dynamic instructions, and then plays loud all the time anyway. He's also adorable.

Anyway, the awkward thing is that we're playing a Haydn aria (this one) and our singer (the conductor's wife, naturally) isn't quite up to it. She sounds good in some places, but a lot of the passage work is not terrible clean, and the high sustained notes have that "soprano imitating a cat" sound. I shouldn't snark, but...

In other news, from this interview with Meghan Whalen Turner (PAGE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CONSPIRACY OF KINGS) is this interesting quote about influential books:

It's a toss-up between Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, which a friend gave me when I was 16 (he thought he was loaning it to me, but I never gave it back) and The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, which I read as a freshman in college. Without Diana, I might not have been published. Without Thucydides, I don't know what I'd be writing.

I always have assumed Herodotus, mostly because of the obvious plot borrowing, but also because of the importance of oracles and religious ceremonies, and the inset stories. It may be because I have so much trouble getting my mind around Thucydides as a whole that I feel like this information has to change how I am seeing these books. But I am probably overthinking.

Comments

[awomanthatsblue.livejournal.com]

Do you know if the dad in your First Family of Alternative Classical Music ever worked for Arizona Broadway Theater? Because I kind of feel like I might know him. (Only I can't remember his name. Ooops. It was like three years or more ago, though, so.) Is he tall and dark?

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but I think it would be unlikely -- he runs 3 or 4 orchestras, and mostly seems to focus on (straight) classical new music.

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

I always figure that snarking on sopranos is okay if they try and tackle stuff that they should freaking KNOW they can't do. I mean, really... you should be able to at least feel that you can't get stuff, just because you'd be straining, never mind the fact that you should hear the difference. And if you can't hear that you don't really have that high F in you, then why the hell are you singing solo?!

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suppose. She actually hits (the concert was tonight) all of the high notes, but her tone gets a little off on them. I suspect that her range and flexibility has contracted a bit as she's gotten older, and she isn't ready to admit it yet. (She says authoritatively, as if she knew anything about singing or vocalists at all!)

[achyvi.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound quite so bad, then. Maybe her hearing is just "off" enough now that she's older that she can still convince herself that everything is still as it once was?