On Saturday, May 20, 2006, at 06:41 AM, Paul Kampen wrote:
Message text written by The Horn List
They arrive to auditions
& have never seen Cosi fan tutte, Freischuetz, Falstaff,
No.8 Symphony or the Nocturno. Enough "lamento" for today.<
Dear All
I recently did a gig playing 2nd to a really brilliant young
technician on
the horn - wonderful articulation, beautiful sound, 100% accurate - a
far
better player than I ever was. The orchestra was a mixture of recently
graduated professionals, semi professionals, amateurs and a couple of
codgers like me at the very end of their professional careers. This
young
man totally ignored the two amateur players in the horn section but
deigned
to exchange a few words with me. He mentioned that he had just done his
first date with a very famous British orchestra (the same one that
gave me
my first break in 1970) and that they had played, he thought, a Brahms
Symphony. I asked which one. He replied that he was not sure but it
started with the horns (so I assumed No 2).
This took me back to my pre-student days, attending a music centre on
Saturday mornings. At the morning break, we would stand around
discussing
the music which we had heard recently, the live concerts which we had
attended and, yes, how many notes the horns had split in such and such
a
symphony. These days, I abhor 'split counting' as much as anybody else
(but there are fewer splits to count) but, it does beg the question -
what
has gone wrong? No longer is it about playing music, it is about
selling
oneself.
I remember one of the few times that, as an MU steward, I lost my
temper
with a colleague - a young violinist who wanted to take a performance
of
Der Rosenkavalier off to do a prestigious date elsewhere, and said
that the
fact that no deputies were available who knew this show and it meant
either
playing one short or having a dep sight reading as "not my problem!"
Regards
Paul A. Kampen (Grumpy old horn player - W. Yorks UK)
You may be a grumpy old curmudgeon, but you're a loveable old
curmudgeon.
Paul Mansur (another grumpy old horn player!)
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