I've been meaning to do this for a couple of weeks and just haven't.
My parish has, since 2002, sponsored a Chamber Orchestra festival in late January. We are blessed with fantastic acoustics for such music, and have been fortunate to be able to structure the finances so that the events pay for themselves, enabling us to offer this outreach to the community, in the tradition of St Martin's-in-the-Fields, London.
This year we commissioned an original work from local composer Max Simoncic. Our music director let him know what resources were going to already be on the stage for the previous work. He had access to those instruments, plus the organ. Mr Simoncic came up with a delightfully fun piece called, appropriately enough, St John's Celebration. Click here and you should be taken to a My Space site where an mp3 recording of the work will start playing automatically. (Note to Robyn: Some nice horn parts.) It's not a professional recording (it was done on my handheld digital voice recorder), but it's respectable.
This year's series was certainly one of the best to date. Max's piece was truly inspired!
ReplyDeleteI would like to clarify a point of possible confusion concerning the MySpace site. "Kiss Me Not Goodbye" was not performed in conjunction with the Chamber Series. It was recorded in St. John's remarkable space for use as part of an audition CD. It was posted on the site because
a) there was room, and
b) it was a convenient way to share the recording with Jessica's friends, most of whom are quite familiar with MySpace.
I hope to be able to post additional recordings from St. John's outstanding Chamber Series on the site in the near future, and would encourage your readers to revisit the site at a later date to sample some gems from past concerts.
Dan, I am impressed and jealous. I don't suppose that was you on organ.
ReplyDeleteTo Robyn:
ReplyDeleteNo. It was Brenda!