One thing that I am really enjoying about Baroque ensemble is having the space to be creative. Unlike the Classical cannon and Romantic music where the tradition is to play exactly as the composer and the conductor dictates and as your teacher and teachers teachers have instructed, with Baroque music, performers have more freedom to add in their own voice with personal ideas of affect, some ornamentation and creativity. It is expected for performers to research and really understand the context in which the piece was written - the performers have a personal influence on music.
On August 12 I went to a concert by the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra a the Melbourne Town Hall. They performed Shostakovich Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, and a world premier of Passing by Katherine Rawlings, a graduate student at Melbourne Uni. It was a really good concert. The Town Hall is a really neat performance space. There is a huge pipe organ at the back of the stage. The orchestra was so large that they had to add some platforms to the front of the stage to fit everybody. The hall itself has two floors and a huge beautiful ceiling with large chandeliers. The ground level is a ballroom floor that had movable chairs arranged for the concert. The balcony has a large section at the back and smaller sections along the sides. There are huge stenciled panels and wood carvings on the walls.
I have also been playing with the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club. They are a performing group that kind of reminds me of Na Fidleiri although there is a huge variety of ages and technical abilities. They are going on a tour in New South Wales over spring break so the rehearsals right now are more performance oriented but still a lot of fun. Any sort of rehearsal or dance gathering around here seems to involve a tea break with lots of food. The weekly rehearsals for the fiddle club are at a home in one of the suburbs so I get to take the train out of the city. They are having a performance this Sunday at the Hawthorne Town Hall that I will probably play in. Should be fun!
The Early Music Studio at the Uni has a Tuesday Soirée Series. The studio is in an old Victorian era house. Kind of like the Charleston singles, it is long and narrow. The performers are in one room and the audience stretches back through the next two (there are double doors between each room). It really is a house concert. The concerts are all started with a small reception with wine and goodies and then people settle into their seats to listen to the music. The first one I went to was duet concert with Greg Dikmans on baroque flute and Lucinda Moon on baroque violin. It was really neat because they lectured in the performance class that afternoon about the music they were performing that night.
Last weekend, I played with Borderline Kaylee at the Ringwood Colonial Dance. We didn't really play much of the music before we got there so it was a lot of fun pulling up each piece and discovering either that I already knew it or finding something brand new. One of my favorites from the evening was playing Doudebleska Polka. Looking at it, I had no idea I knew it. The second I started to play it, I realized it was one of the dances that we learned in the folk dance classes at the Oregon Suzuki Institute! When we got to the third section of the music, I was kind of confused - later I figured out that when dancing this section, I never listened to the melody because the dancers clap here. It was a lot of fun.
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