I'm spending this week as a student (studying recorder playing) at Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute, founded in the 1970s and responsible for producing (or at least stimulating) many of the great early music performers of the subsequent four decades. This year: "In the valley of the Danube" -- the Austrians who preceded Haydn and Mozart. I'm working on Telemann, though, even though he's not a Danubian composer!
One of the great things about BPI is that they welcome old amateurs like me and put us in ensembles with excellent young players. Keeps me going, for sure.
On Sunday, after auditioning for my ensemble placement, I went to Cleveland for the ChamberFest concert: now in its second year, a pretty fabulous collection of young musicians from around the country. It's organized by Cleveland Orchestra principal clarinetist Franklin Cohen and his daughter Diana, concertmaster at Calgary.
Here's my review of that concert at ClevelandClassical.
Now back to practicing!
