Showing posts with label Fumiyo Yamamoto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fumiyo Yamamoto. Show all posts

07 April 2024

Darkness and light

It's amusing that this was the second gig with Chris Latham as MD where we sat in darkness.  The darkness was for the projected images of modern art that we were accompanying.  OK as long as your batteries on your music stand lights were fresh!  (They were).  Batteries for tuners, too, because the basses had to tune down E>Eb for the final tune.  Otherwise, this was reverent, as Chris' concert are.  We were located at the Chapel at the ACCC (Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture) near the huge cross on the lake.  The space is cement and thus has its own acoustic.  The music was a string of short pieces, from Bach and Rach through a string of lesser-known Europeans and others, Weinberg, Klein, Weiner and Kattenberg as well Simon, Walton, Koicki and Dreyfus and a segment of lovely FS Kelly songs.  I so love the gentle and touching music of FS Kelly, deceased young in WW1.  Chris had gathered and often arranged the tunes. Our singer was Christina Wilson with her soprano of power and obvious invention that showed when she sang a complex but wordless segment.  Fumiyo Yamamoto also featured on one violin solo.  Let it not be thought that short and predominantly slow means easy.  There's difficulty in delicate bowing and in unexpected counts.  It's nothing like fast incessant Beethoven parts with their own difficulties.  So another successful and purposeful performance with Chris Latham.  Thanks again Chris.

Chris Latham (conductor, musical director, arranger. violin) led Musica da Camera in a string of tunes at the Chapel at ACCC.  Christina Wilson (soprano) sang and Fumiyo Yamamoto (violin) and Margaret Kahn (cello) soloed.

23 November 2020

Tourism

There's a big push for local tourism with the waning of Covid in Australia but I'm not sure this can be called tourism.  Not sure it can even be called "on tour" because we just drove out for the day but it sounds cool.  Not that being on tour is such a comfy existence in the real world, but Musica da Camera's Sunday concert jaunt after each Saturday Cook concert is a pleasure.  And this was our 10th anniversary in Gunning; in the richly reverberant Shire Hall.  These out-of-town gigs are fun and, given it's a rehash of the program, they tends to be our best performances.  With Covid, the programs are shorter and we are doing two iterations in Canberra, so this was particularly satisfying as the third try.  Those missed repeats and poor counts and the like were fixed, and Rosemary took it slower and the works seemed to grow in intensity.  That surprised me.  So a pleasure it was.  The program was quite obscure, at least to me.  Rossini Viva Rossini was cute. Then Respighi Ancient arias and dances suite 3, the major ensemble work of the day, was somewhat odd and quite challenging.  Then Vivaldi Winter featuring a 15-yo violin powerhouse, a student of Rosemary, Fumiyo Yamamoto.  She also played the drastic dynamics of Sarasate Zigeunerweisen to finish up, with Alex Rowley Christmas suite for strings interspersed with its disguised carol quotes as a reminder that this unfortunate year of fires and hail and pandemics and Trump and more is coming to an end.  Good riddance.  But nice to do our little tour and to play with Fumiyo and just to neaten things up for this, the third and final iteration of this concert.  Until next year...

Musica da Camera performed Rossini, Reshigi, Vivaldi, Rowley and Sarasate under Rosemary Macphail (director) with soloist Fumiyo Yamamoto (violin) in two concerts at Cook and one in Gunning.

This is CJBlog post no. 2,300.