Tristan

This is quite possibly the most romantic piece of all time. We're playing this, sans soprano tonight. It is Isolde's love death from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. Basically Isolde has come upon her lover right as he is dying. He dies in her arms and then she dies of grief after singing this aria. It is one time where I am not wishing an opera singer to die a little faster from down in the pit. Just gorgeous.

A good review!

My quartet performed for the first time this season yesterday. It went well, we were happy. We were happier when we saw the review..... My heartfelt thanks to "the boys" for making this ambitious program a heck of a lot of fun to prepare.






Quartet plays togetherness beautifully from Knoxville News Sentinel

New gig!

I am now the official musician blogger for the symphony! I will be blogging twice weekly through the season about what is going on at the KSO as well as just music in general. My first blog posted today!!! (can you tell I'm excited?) To check it out, go to the symphony's website: http://www.knoxvillesymphony.com and click on "blog."

Letter of the week

Preschool is going well. WG now enters the building of her own free will and today, for the first time, she did not have a meltdown when I picked her up. She has friends and seems to be settling into the routine. Her main beef is that they make her use the bathroom. WG has a tremendous bladder capacity which combined with her tremendous pain tollerance makes pottying an annoyance. If she had it her way she would use the bathroom once a week or so.

She has homework. Granted, it's preschool, so it's not hard homework. Last Friday she had to wear something green because green is the school's color. (Their mascot is the dragon.) Today she came home with her sheet about what they were learning this week as well as homework. They are learning all about the letter R this week. Her assignment for tomorrow is to bring something that starts with the letter R for Millie the Letter Muncher to eat.

I have never met Millie, I'm thinking they want WG to bring a picture of something that starts with R. A picture of a rainbow is much easier to send than the real thing. WG spent dinner going through a laundry list of words. "ruh-ruh-refridgerator. Does refridgerator start with R? Ruh-ruh-pisghetti. Does pisghetti start with R? HAHAHAHA!!!" She gets it.

We forgot to find pictures so I was looking for some to cut out for her to choose from in the morning. I found an old Rachel Ray magazine. I cut her out. She is a double R, which in my opinion should mean extra credit. And besides, don't you just want to feed Rachel Ray to Millie the letter muncher? I think I might send her along anyway even if WG chooses the Roadkill Racoon.

Ode to the tuba

WG *loves* the tuba. When asked what she likes about it she says, "everything." Then she makes oompa sounds and dances around the room. She makes tubas out of whatever she can get her hands on: paper towel tubes, cardboard, plastic cups... Her love of the tuba has been long lasting. It's been about a year now and there is no sign of her wavering. Every day when we get her teeny 1/16th size violin out to practice she asks if they make teeny tiny tubas. And every day she sighs when I tell her that she has to wait until she's older.

The symphony's principal tubist was very excited when I told him about her love of the tuba. Last Valentine's day WG colored cut-out paper hearts to give to people. She made them for friends and family, but she saved the biggest, most colorful Valentine for the principal tubist's tuba. Not the person, but the tuba itself. He was pretty tickled by the whole thing. He offered to give her lessons. I asked if he taught 3 year olds. Well, no, but as soon as she hits jr. high...

So WG is stuck with the violin for now. We keep telling her as soon as she's big enough she can play the tuba. Honestly, she's a pretty big kid: tall and muscular so it wouldn't surprise me if she could physically handle it in a few years. She can already get a sound out of Tim's trumpet. We *know* she has lung power from the days (year) of terrible colic. Probably she needs some permanent teeth first, though....

The Granola Recipes

I always do something special for my section at the end of the symphony season. We always have a good group in the viola section and they make my job as principal easy. The past few years I've made fudge but this year in an effort to be healthier I decided to make granola to give. I still made some fudge (hey, if you were expecting fudge and you didn't get any wouldn't you be disappointed???) but not the five or six kinds I've made in the past. The granola was a huge hit. Everyone has said it is the best granola they have ever eaten. (Thanks, Dad!)


Here's my father's original recipe:

5 C rolled oats

1 C wheat germ

1 C wheat bran

1/2 C Cream of Wheat

1/4 C sesame seeds

1/4 C sunflower seeds

1/2 C chopped nuts

1 t cinnamon



*Mix all ingredients together in a BIG bowl. Then melt together on the stove: 1/3 C honey, 1/3 C molasses, 1/2 C vegetable oil, 1/2 C peanut butter. Pour over dry ingredients and mix well. Divide the mixture into 2 large greased baking pans. Bake @300 for 25-30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. DO NOT LET IT BURN! Allow to cool. Add dried fruit as desired.



Here is my Gluten Free version (and the version I made for my collegues):

6 C GF oats

1 C pumpkin seeds

1 C sunflower seeds

1/2 C sesame seeds

1 C chopped nuts

(I missed the cinnamon. Whoops!)



For wet ingredients I used 1/2 C natural peanut butter, 1/2 C canola oil, 1/3 C honey and some brown sugar because I didn't have any molasses. I just eyeballed the liquid measurements. The rest of the procedure was the same as Dad's original recipe. When I made it for my collegues I doubled the recipe and used almond butter as well as peanut butter. For fruit I used dried pineapple, Turkish apricots, and craisins. Yum!

opera rules

This past weekend was Knoxville's annual Rossini Festival. There were two different operas performed and an Italian street fair. Probably other festivities as well. Knoxville Symphony partners with Knoxville Opera Company, so I played two performances of Tosca. You would think that during the Rossini Festival we'd play a Rossini opera, right? (or I would, at least) Puccini wrote Tosca and Verdi wrote La Traviata, which was the other opera performed.

Usually I have enough down time during an opera to piece together the plot from reading bits and pieces of the translation that is projected above the stage. In Tosca, though, I rarely was able to put the viola down. It is one of the rare pieces of music where the violas have more juicy bits to play then the 1st violins. I looked up a synopsis on the internet and realized that tragic operas all follow the same basic rules:

1. True love is not allowed. If you follow your heart, you WILL pay.

2. Opera characters have terrible eyesight. Women masquerading as men, men changing their names to escape whoever.... As an audience, we have just met these people. WE recognize them when they are disguise and we're sitting far away. It's a wonder they are able to negotiate the stage when they can't recognize a disguised lover who is two feet away from them.

3. It's not over until EVERYONE is dead. There is NO happy ever after in tragic opera.

4. Death is never swift

Earlier this season I had the pleasure of playing Verdi's La Forza Del Destino. (also with KOC) The basic plot is as follows:

Don Alvaro and Leonora are in love, but it's forbidden. (Rule #1) Leonora's father enters to see them about to run away together. D.A. surrenders to father, drops his gun on the floor. It goes off and kills Leonora's father. (one down) D.A. and Leonora run away separately. D.A. changes his name and Leonora masquerades as a man. (rule #2) They both join the army. Leonora fears that it will be discovered that she is a woman, so she goes to a monastery and pleads with them to take her in since her brother has vowed to kill her because she (and D.A.) killed Dad. The monks take her in but make her live in a cave in solitude.

Meanwhile, D.A. (who now goes by a different name) has become fast friends with Leonora's brother who doesn't recognized him because he changed his name. (Rule# 2) D.A. is wounded in battle and thinks he is going to die, so he asks brother to get rid of a box without looking in it. Of course brother looks, he sees a picture of Leonora and figures out who D.A. REALLY is. D.A. is miraculously saved in surgery only to find himself in a sword duel with Leonora's brother. He escapes, changes his name again (rule #2) and joins the same monastery where Leonora is hanging out in a cave. Leonora's brother tracks him down and forces him to duel. D.A. kills him. (two down) Hearing D.A's voice, Leonora comes out of her cave. Realizing what has happened, she leans over her dying brother who, in his last effort, stabs her in the heart. (three down) She goes on to sing a looooooong aria before dying. D.A. then throws himself over a cliff. (four down) And, CURTAIN.

Beautiful music but what a depressing way to spend an afternoon! I'll take comic operas full of man-birds, dragons and men dressing as women / women dressing as men any day.....

By the way, if you do attend an opera (and, despite my personal dislike of the plots of tragic operas, it IS a really fun thing to do. Just think of it as a soap opera in Italian.) try to get seats where you can see into the orchestra pit. All sorts of crazy things are going on. Friday night our giant set of orchestra chimes started to pitch over. A bass player caught them, boosted them back up and they started pitching the other way. Turns out that they were off of a caster. So our panicked percussion section was madly trying to steady the chimes as quietly as they could while still counting rests.