Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong

Flute Choir Concert

The Culver City Flute Choir performed our 20th anniversary concert on Thursday night. I've been with the group since 1995 and have enjoyed every moment of it. Okay, most moments except for the often sucky drive from Woodland Hills to Culver City at rush hour every Thursday. Anyway, we played 8 pieces that were selected by us as our favorites. We started off with wanting to play 20 pieces, once from each year, but that became impossible with the time frame we were dealing with. If we had planned this for two quarters, it might have been doable. Although the audience might've slit their wrists to hear that much flute playing. No amount of brownies could bribe them to sit that long so the 8 selected pieces worked out just perfectly.

I've been with the group for 12 years and since I joined, I've bought all new flutes. I have a beautiful professional C flute, a piccolo, alto and bass. Since I've gotten the alto and bass, my C flute playing has gone down a lot mostly because we need the bass sounds and only 3 of us have the bass flutes. That has made me cranky at times because my C flute is my most expensive instrument and it's really my first instrument and I love to play it. So when I get put on bass all the time, I get cranky. Forget playing piccolo. As it turned out, as the 20 pieces kept getting cut down and down, at the end of the day, I ended up playing C flute on 5 pieces, piccolo on 2 and bass on only 1. All the pieces that were cut were almost all my bass parts. It was nice to play and really practice my C flute.

The concert actually went well. There were some definite mistakes which I think can be blamed on being under rehearsed. But the audience didn't know, I know that for sure. If we had narrowed down the selections a week earlier, the rehearsals would've been more productive. But it was all good. C enjoyed us playing the "William Tell Overture". Thanks to Little Einsteins, my girl definitely has been exposed to classical music and loves it when I play things she knows on my flute.

The final piece we played was the "Air in D" by J.S. Bach. At the annual National Flute Association Convention, it's the final piece that's played at the closing ceremonies. They tape the parts to the back of the chairs and you play the part that's in front of you. When you play this famous piece with 1000+ flutists, it's really inspiring. For our concert, we invited past flute choir members to join us in playing and several showed up with their flutes. So there were 15 or 16 of us playing and it was really so pretty. Considering we hadn't all rehearsed as a group, it sounded quite spectacular if I say so myself (and that doesn't happen too often with our group) It was so pretty and tender and actually special. I hope when I listen to the DVD, I wasn't imagining it.

Here's me and Irene playing our piccolos on "Bluebird". (picture stolen from Irene's blog)


And here's the whole group of us playing the Bach finale. Those not dressed in black are our former members who played along with us.

Next concert is our holiday fiesta in December. If anyone is interested in attending, let me know and if I get on the ball, I'll post ahead of time.

Labels: Culver City Flute Choir, J.S. Bach, Little Einsteins

posted by Juls @ 10:27 PM