Best posts made by barliman2001

@Vulgano-Brother When I was still playing in a brass quintet - can't seem to get one together these days - we had an external musical director who not only supervised our rehearsing, but wrote original music for us as well. Worked perfectly and brought a bunch of rank amateurs (as we then were) into all the big local concert halls... even though some of the original music was distinctly weird: "Variations on Greensleeves", with every variation representing a different period of music history: va. 1 a Bach fugue, var. 2 a Mozart minuet, var. 3 Beethovenesque, var. 4 Bruckner, var. 5 a military march, var. 6 Wagnerian, var. 7 being dodecaphonic...

Just listen, and comment...
Same concert, with top performers of their times...
first, Adolf Scherbaum, with one of the first piccolo trumpets, 1961

Maurice André, 1966

Then, 1970, with Pierre Thibaud, with an early Selmer picc,

Maurice André, 1979

Maurice André, 1989
Youtube Video

Reinhold Friedrich, 2007

Friedemann Immer, 2000
Youtube Video

And the crystal meth version, with John Eliot Gardiner and Neil Brough

Finally, the hardcore version, without any valves or holes or helps whatsoever...

@SSmith1226 In the same spirit: How do you describe a marriage? A marriage consist of two people. One is always right, and the other is the husband.

Michael Praetorius was a 16th century composer, one of the first to really incorporate brass music into the Church, and one of the most important not to take up old melodies, but provide new melodies for later composers and arrangers...

@newell-post He's probably poisoning pigeons in the park...

@OldSchoolEuph It certainly can, my friend, but only if every member uses this forum in a civilized and orderly way. In the case of the deleted topic, there was very little fact and an enormous amount of defamation and abuse. And as there was indeed 90% abuse and only 10% content, it was easier to delete the whole topic.

@GeorgeB said in Christmas Services:

@barliman2001
Now that was one really interesting situation. Playing in the cold is definitely no fun. But I'm sure you did well, sir.

As to playing in the cold - one Austrian oompah band a few years back bought several score of hand warmers (working with burning coal sticks inside) to zip tie to the valve blocks of instruments to avoid freezing (which is liable to happen at below zero temperatures). On one occasion, before a Christmas market gig, these hand warmers were lit and issued. Most of the guys directly zip tied them to the instruments and just carried the unwrapped instruments to the gig ( a few hundred yards down the road). One of the flugel players did not yet bother to fumble with the zip ties but just tossed the hand warmer into his gig bag. Half-way down to the gig, his bag was giving off smoke signals... the hand warmer had come undone and spilt the burningcoal inside, setting the lining on fire... when the guy investigated and opened up the bag, he was welcomed by a raging flame. The local fire brigade had a busy fifteen minutes putting the blazing bag out, and the insurance later refused to pay for the burnt-up flugel (an almost new gold-plated Votruba Professional worth around € 5,000) due to "culpable negligence".

At the moment, I'm listening to a continuous stream of a number of arias and lieder, every day, live... my wife is having a solo recital on 9 February...

A parson is on a trip in a yacht when a gale comes up and sinks the boat. As he's swimming around far from land, a boat approaches. He refuses to be hauled aboard, saying, "The Lord will rescue me."
An hour later, a helicopter hovers above him. The rescue diver wants to get him into the basket, but he refuses with the words, "The Lord will save me."
Finally, he can swim no more. Sinking, he reproaches the Lord, "Oh Lord, why didn't you save me?"
And he gets an answer, "You numbskull, who did you think sent the boat and the chopper? See you in a moment!"

Actually, it is customary not to mention the orchestral excerpts because the will be announced at short notice without any preparation time whatsoever. They are still an integral part of the audition process. In addition, the audition process at German orchestras usually is a multi-stage one, with only the requirements for the first stage being publicised. As the audition for a solo viola player showed... the orchestra were quite pleased at what the candidate presented, but, having been burnt before, they asked the candidate to play the fast demisemiquaver passage from "the Bartered Bride". And the viola candidate readily agreed, saying, "well, yes, if you've got enough time for that..."

Twenty years later, in a preview for a new Vienna musical...

and in between...

Currently to be heard and seen in Kurt Weill's A Touch of Venus in Opera Graz

A guy to his friends: "My mother-in-law has now reached her ideal weight." -
"Really? And what is it?" -
"Seven pounds including the urn."

@administrator said in Wonder which Valve Oil they use.:

I'm curious about a few things.

1. How do we know they played with no vibrato in the Baroque era? I mean, we don't have recordings.
2. How do we know they ballooned their notes like they are doing in the video?

You are right, there are no recordings. But people wrote instead and closely described what was to be done. Almost every other musician of any note produced tutorials for his students: Friedrich Wilhelm Reiche, for example, could not just say, "Go and get yourself an Arban copy". For one, Arban would not be born for a couple of centuries; and for the second, printed books were still rare and expensive. So people like J.S. Bach produced things like the "Piano Book for Anna Magdalena Bach" which in their original version not only contained music, but lots of additional advice, thus showing us the way the composer wanted the pieces to be played.

By the way, this is my wife's principal pianist as member of comic opera group THE CAST... enjoy!

An orchestra are touring Israel. One day, they are free and decide to go bathing on the Sea of Galilee. One downtrodden viola player wrestles with his Lord, saying: "Oh Lord, you know how poorly regarded I am. In your infinite power, let me do something remarkable and here, where you walked on water, let me do the same."
The Lord, in his infinite mercy, accedes to that request, and the viola player is walking on the water. As he nears the shore, he suddenly hears the leader of the orchestra, shouting, "Just look at him! He can't even swim!"

@seth-of-lagos Mravinsky certainly let the brass do their thing , as you said, "on the ragged edge"; but that ragged edge was most probably sharpened by the instruments they had at their disposal... look at the year the recording was made: 1953. Stalin was probably still alive during much of the recording process, the Cold War was in full swing, trade relations between East and West were almost inexistent and "the Leningrad Factory" - one of only three places in the Soviet Union where brass instruments were made - still lay in ruins, only being rebuilt and back into business some years later. They probably had to do their best on - if lucky - very old instruments, or - if not - on some student grade horns slapped together somehow; and it is known that some of these musicians were reduced to building their own horns out of any materials they could find. One tuba is known to have had engine springs from a military truck as valve springs, being made out of the brass of spent shell casings...
As the joke went...
What is the difference between a Capitalist and a Socialist violin player? -
The Capitalist has an old violin and a new car, withn the Socialist it is the other way round.

@Dale-Proctor said in Phony players:

@BigDub said in Phony players:

On the show, Hogan’s Heroes, Colonel Klink Would occasionally play the violin, much to the discomfort of those who happened to be in the same room.
He looked rather convincing, but if you looked closely, there weren’t even any strings on the instrument!

Interesting factoid - Werner Klemperer’s father was Otto Klemperer, the famous orchestral conductor.

Even more interesting - quite a number of the actors in that show were either of Jewish descent or had lost family and friends due to Nazi terror.

A father has intercepted Santa on the roof... "You won't take a tenner to forget my son wanted a saxophone? Twenty? Thirty? A hundred?"

For me, this Christmas season started with four Christmas market gigs and will continue with five more of the same, but that is almost nothing compared to other years where sometimes I had to play Christmas Oratorio three times in a row... this year is centred around my wife's debut at Graz Opera (she sang almost everywhere else, but never before in Graz) in the small but important role of Mrs. Kramer in Kurt Weill's biggest Broadway success, A Touch of Venus - played many thousans of times in the US, but never before in Austria... Another 12 performances to go...

What do I feel about vibrato? Slightly shaken.