An Evening with Apollo's Fire

Last night Paul & I saw Apollo's Fire (The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra), with James Sommerville as featured soloist playing 2 Mozart Horn Concertos on the natural horn. This is the French horn from 200 years ago, which has no valves. Only a few notes (from the overtone series) can be played on it, but you can get the rest of the notes in the chromatic scale by manipulating your hand inside the bell, which raises or lowers the pitch. We came early for the pre-concert lecture, sat in the front row, and were enthralled along with all the other music nerds as he showed us some of the technical things about the instrument and did some demonstrations. When he played a scale, each consecutive note had a totally different timbre and hand position.

He was just tremendous in the concert, playing expressively and masterfully through all the runs, trills, and occasional cadenzas. I never really noticed before how Mozart often put an "open" note on the stronger part of the beat and the stopped or altered notes on the weak part, so when he did the opposite it has an impact we don't hear on a modern horn. So cool. The orchestra also played on period instruments, so everything had a mellower, muted sound quality.

One of the bass players, Sue Yelanjian, had been in some of my classes when I was at CIM, so I went up to say hi to her aferwards and catch up a little bit. One of my former music theory profs, Mrs. Roy, was there too. She remembered me--in fact, she and Mr. Guy still get together sometimes and she said just this week they had been talking about me! Funny, since I had just Googled him a few days ago to see if he was still at CIM (he is, but no longer the Theory Dept. Chair--Mrs. Roy says "he got tired of putting up with that.") I should email him. Of course, I also got to introduce Paul to these people from my past, which I love to do!

We went out for a late dinner at Nighttown afterward--excellent food and live jazz, and we didn't even have to wait for a table since it was so late. On our way out, who should we see huddling up at the bar but our evening's soloist, James Sommerville, smoking a cigarette.