I AM SO PUMPED UP!

Yep. Me and Libby had our concert today!! I had a solo and I DIDN'T miss my cue (like I did at rehearsal all the time :P), and I was doubling piccolo (Piccolo is awesome) and it was great! Libby did great, she had a lot of spirit, and she and her section were really lovely. Just beautiful! She is such a talented violinist. :)
Here's the list of songs we played....

Finale to Symphony 2 in C Major by Tchaikovsky
This one was very easy, and a lot of fun to play! This piece was performed as a collaboration with another orchestra from a different city. They were really cool to meet! I loved this one part where the 2nd Violins (Read: Libby's Section) had pizzicato offbeats, and they totally aced it!

Violin Concerto by Accolay
Every year we have the Concerto Competition, and this year the winner was a violinist and he played this one. It's a pretty good song, and he was very skilled. It's not really my taste in music, but like I said, the soloist was very good!

Turkish Fragments by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov
Now this was a terrific piece, and definitely one of my new favorites! The first movement, aptly named 'Caravan', really does sound like a Caravan lumbering through the desert. The second movement, 'At Rest', has it all. Beautiful melodies, terrific percussion, and even a really good Piccolo part! I was thrilled and really scared at the same time to play it, because it's so prominent!

On the Steppes of Central Asia by Alexander Borodin
This piece is really something special and amazing. This song is about the Russians discovering Central Asia back in the 1800's. At first, a very Russian melody plays, and then a Central Asian melody plays. But they're apart, so it shows that the two cultures don't quite understand each other yet. Later in the song, the two are played together, and this represents the reconciliation of the two cultures. The music is very beautiful, and has a magnificent swell and decrescendo. Love it.

Symphonic Pictures of Turkmenistan by Nury Halmamedov
Our performance today was actually the U.S. premier of this piece! I really love this. It was written when the composer was only 23, and there are so many different moods and sounds that it's really quite an experience.  I'd write a lot more, but I'm really tired. :) I played Flute/Piccolo for about 4 hours straight today and my shoulders and wrists feel like jelly. XD When our CD comes out in a few months, I think I'll to a full feature of it in a post. It's just not enough to talk about this music! You have to hear it to really get it.

Righteous Classical Music: Danse Macabre [Camille Saint-Saens]

Dear Mister Conductor: May we please play this amazing song for our next concert? It has everything you could possibly want, like a creepy backstory, a breathtaking violin solo part, and some neat percussion! I mean, there's plenty for you to work with here! We'd have a ball!
-Monica (2nd Flute/Piccolo)

Ahem. As you may have gathered, I suddenly find myself a huge fan of this piece of music. So much that I thought it would be worth writing a post about. As you gathered from the title, the piece in question today is Danse Macabre, a tone poem by Camille Saint-Saens. A tone poem is a piece of music, or a symphony that is supposed to tell a story or evoke a scene. Other examples would be the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz (which I learned all about while eavesdropping on the music appreciation class at school), or Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, by Claude Debussy. The latter is more about establishing the mood of a scene than telling a story, but in my book it still counts. ;)
SO! Danse Macabre is based on old French superstition. They say that every Halloween at midnight, Death (or the Devil, according to some tellings) comes to the graveyard with his violin and plays, forcing the skeletons to dance for him. At dawn the cock crows, and he stops playing and the skeletons must return to their graves to wait all year for another night of hard partying.
The symphony begins with a harp, playing the note D twelve consecutive times, to represent the coming of Midnight.
After that, there's a little quiet part, and then out of nowhere the violin soloist plays dissonant, eerie doublestops that if you're not expecting, can be a bit of a jump moment. The solo violinist 'plays' Death, and it's actually pretty cool. The violin soloist has to tune his E string down a half step to Eb, in part for the tritone chords at the beginning. It sounds wicked awesome.
Anyway, so next, the main theme is carried by the flute (yay!). Except that the flute doesn't seem to play any character (like the violin, or later the oboe) or serve any symbolic purpose (like the harp or xylophone), it's just there.
The whole piece has a terrifically eerie feel to it. I get shivers down my spine listening to it! Enjoy...



Next Up!: Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity by Gustav Holst

Los Miserables [2011]

Yeah. Me and my Dad are becoming weirdos who own a billion different Les Mis recordings. Actually, we already are weirdos, but we've all got our things we like. Some people like Star Wars, other people like Lord of the Rings, and we at Spilled Ink like Les Miserables.
Anyway, my Dad got this CD for Christmas from Mom, and it's in Spanish!
So! This is from 2011 (as you might have seen in the title, granted) and it ha the same orchestrations as the 25th anniversary concert. The conducting is a little fast, and there are songs that were previously somewhere around Moderato that are now done at a brisk Allegretto. I could go here or there on the tempos and orchestrations. I don't mind the faster tempos, and in most of the songs, the orchestrations are really beautiful! The only song who's instrumentals I didn't really like were Javert's Suicide. It doesn't sound as dramatic or intense to me. But you know, it's a matter of taste I guess. :)
 Standout songs for me would be Estrellas (Stars), Sale el Sol (One Day More) and Solo Para Mi (On My Own). The Prologue sounded really cool, the rhythm was uber emphasized, and the chorus members were really good.
I really dig the guy who played Jean Valjean in this recording. He was a terrific actor, and he hits the last note in Quien Soy Yo (Who Am I) very well. It sounds so excellent. I also like his version of Bring Him Home, or Salvalo. Either this song is growing on me, or he just did a really amazing job of it. All in all, this guy is really good! A little hammy in the Prologue, but that is to be expected I suppose. XD Maybe he was trying to come off as gruff and hardened or something.
Something I really like about this album is that the entire cast is really good, both singing and acting-wise. Usually there is at least one singer in a Cast Album that you don't like, but that's not the case here. Normally, I don't feel too partial to Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, but the version on this CD is majorly sad. Which means it was done right. XD Cosette has a very sweet voice, I liked her. Though um, she sounded a bit like (pardon my overactive imagination) a cartoon mouse! All through A Heart Full of Love, all I could see in my mind's eye was Marius holding a little girl mouse in a dress on his hand. XD
 Eponine was one of my favorites, I like her voice, and the attitude she lends to the character. She's very fiery, and in Solo Para Mi there are a few lines that sound a bit more sarcastic than in other languages. Fantine's actress did a good job with Sone Una Vida, the I Dreamed a Dream equivalent. Enjolras made me laugh at times because he was just so into it (adorably so in Sale El Sol), and his version of the Final Battle is very rousing. :)
Oh yeah, and how could I forget Javert? Well, he's really good. He was um, super hammy in Javert's Suicide though. Yikes. But even with that, his voice and acting (for the most part) was totally spot on!
So! I don't speak very good Spanish (despite the fact that I live in California and have Mexican Heritage :P), but I know that they were speaking Castilian Spanish, that is, European Spanish. The biggest difference between European Spanish and Latin American Spanish, to my ears at least, is that some of the words with 's' sounds are a little erm, lisped. Well, not lisped in the sense that everyone in Spain has a speech impediment, it's just the way the accents over there work. So 'Cielo' (heaven) becomes 'Thielo', and so forth. It just struck me as funny because I'm used to Latin American Spanish. XD
Anyway, one of the coolest things on this album is Sale El Sol. The cast is so good in that one, the orchestra is rocking, and the title is so righteous. Literally, Sale El Sol literally translates to 'The Sun Rises' or 'The Rising of the Sun'. But it's also an expression similar to 'You live to see another day'. SO awesome.

The Verdict: A+
For a terrific cast and neato instrumentals. :)
Favorite Song: Sale El Sol
Runners Up: Estrellas, Solo Para Mi, Quien Soy Yo

In Defense of 'The Passion of the Christ'

It's Holy Week. Something that Catholics are encouraged to do during Holy Week is to meditate on Christ's sacrifice on the Cross.

Sometimes, it's hard to imagine what He did for us. Christ's death is softened by distance, and even if we know in our minds that it was horrifically painful in both a physical and spiritual sense, maybe we don't really understand it in our hearts. There are various ways to remedy this. For me, it's The Stations of the Cross. Taking Christ's journey up to to Golgotha, step by step, is kind of a powerful thing for me. When I was little, it used to make me cry. I'd like to think that I have more self-control now, but nothing really brings to home the gravity of Jesus' sacrifice like praying the Stations of the Cross.

Okay, but now, you're probably wondering about the title. Yes, I was leading up to something with that. Something my Dad likes to do to help understand Good Friday is to watch The Passion of the Christ. It's not the only thing he does to understand Good Friday, but it certainly does make you think about it.

This movie has received criticism from the mainstream media for being too 'Gory'.

Let's reflect on the absurdity of that statement. Hollywood makes thousands of movies. And a whole lot of them are a whole lot gorier than The Passion of the Christ.

What about Alien? How come that movie isn't criticized for the Chest-Burster scene? Howabout Saving Private Ryan? This movie has the most harrowing war sequence ever put to film. Does it get dumped on because of this? Of course not. The point of the gore isn't to excite those with sick and twisted interests. It's to serve as a reminder of what those poor men went through and why they did it.

Same goes for The Passion of the Christ. Nobody sits through that movie thinking to themselves “Gee, I can't wait until the next scene where Our Lord gets tortured and humiliated!”

You watch that movie because you want to understand what Our Lord went through to save us from our sins.

The Passion of the Christ is a very intense movie. Far too intense for a lot of people. No problem here! Nowhere in Catholic doctrine does it say that you have to watch a movie to be a good Christian. It helps some of us put into perspective what went on that day, and that's all. It's not a typical Hollywood orgy of gore, and it's not required that you watch it. I'm not even sure if I will view it all the way through. But what I do see of it, I will remember, and will never forget that incredible act of love performed for a world that didn't even deserve it.

Sumi-E!

Sumi-E is a Japanese/Chinese style of painting that is a lot different from the Western style of painting. It's very unique and beautiful because it's not so much about capturing a likeness or showing a scene, but more about bringing to life the spirit of the subject.
I've never been an awfully brilliant artist, definitely not in Western style art because I was never good at perspective, or drawing people, or really any kind of realistic detail. But I took to Sumi-E, and am semi-competent at it. Here are some of my paintings that I'm very excited about because they don't look terrible. :D

So first off, here's a frog (in case you couldn't tell XD). I like this guy. I'd like to try him again and see if I can do it better, but for now I'm happy with him!

 Here are some grapes, I'm very happy with how this one turned out!

Ruby-Throated Hummingbird... I'm happy with this one too. :D

 

Here' a wonky cat. Cats and Butterflies are often painted together in Sumi-E. Cats represent good luck and long life, and butterflies represent love.

 

 And finally, here's a Tiger Lily, my favorite flower. :)

 

 

Thanks for looking!

Righteous Classical Music: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy is sort of the musical equivalent of an impressionist painter. This piece doesn't work the way normal classical music does, it's a lot more vague sounding, and has a very heavenly feel. The sound is very warm, and light. When I close my eyes while listening to it, the colors gold, light pink, and green come to mind, or the image of sunlight filtering through trees.
Afternoon of a Faun has terrific parts for the entire orchestra, the woodwind section especially. The piece starts out with a flute playing a haunting melody all by itself, and there are a lot of neat oboe and clarinet solos, too.
I'm kind of sad that We had to cut this piece from our program last semester. I mean sure, I wouldn't have gotten the solo, but there are some parts that are just transcendent and the one rehearsal we played this all the way through, I totally lapsed into a trance around the 4:20-6:00 minute mark. That's where the metaphorical bird takes flight and the song is SO beautiful! Thanks, Claude Debussy!


Next on the agenda: Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens!

Hee hee

Libby really has a thing for Once Upon a Time. She loves it. I, on the other hand, really am not fond of it (though the Neverland part in Season 3 was GREAT!!). But me and Libby both agree that Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin is an awesome character. Maybe the most awesome character on the show.
So I made this.

Heh heh. If I had directed Once Upon a Time, it would have just been the Rumple show. XD