[Music] St Andrews On the Rocks

This week has been a busy one so far for me. We're in the middle of the "On the Rocks" arts festival here in St Andrews, which means music, music, and more music!

Monday lunchtime saw the St Andrews Bassoon Quartet's last formal concert of the year. We had a pretty intense rehearsal schedule for it, as the other three only arrived back from the Easter break a week prior to the concert, and I was away in Bath. We therefore had to resort to our first ever weekend rehearsal, but we still only had 3 & 1/2 hours of practise under our belts. Fortunately our theme this time around was film music, which allowed us to pull out a couple of pieces that we'd performed before and meant that we were all pretty familiar with the music we were playing. It also helped that we'd made the conscious decision to avoid long medleys; playing multiple shorter pieces definitely cut down on the time required to get them up to scratch.

For interest's sake, here's our program for the concert:

• Universal Studios Intro + Jurassic Park
• The Great Escape
• Concerning Hobbits
• Schindler's List (for which I was playing the solo)
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• Thunderbirds

All in all it seemed to go well. It was short even by lunchtime concert standards, at only 15 minutes or so, but we had a decently sized audience as far as I could tell (I have a tendency to avoid looking at them during our concerts!). We even managed to get recordings this time, on my laptop and two cameras, so we may actually get some youtube videos out in a timely fashion for a change.

Then yesterday was the Symphony Orchestra's concert for the semester. It was slightly earlier in the semester than normal owing to "On the Rocks", and the Wednesday time slot meant that a lot of the student body were playing sport, which hurt our audience numbers I think. I don't think it was helped by what seemed, to me, to be very poor publicity for the concert. I've spoken to several people that didn't realise it was on. Nevertheless, the audience were very appreciative of the concert. There were a lot of tired musicians by the end of the concert; everyone put a lot of effort into it, and we'd been rehearsing that afternoon as well.

The University of St Andrews Symphony Orchestra in concert. (Credit: Stand News)

The opening piece was a world premiere - 'Fanfaronade' by Mark David Boden, the University's composer in residence. It was typically modern, with odd chords, strange rhythms,  and weirdly disjointed interjections fro various instruments. I find that type of piece very difficult to play; for someone brought up with the more traditional orchestral repertoire, it's not obvious how the piece gels together and where your line fits in. I enjoyed the challenge of the piece, but I'll be glad if I never see it again. The audience seemed a bit nonplussed by it to be honest, and the applause afterwards was very hesitant.

The second piece was another world premiere, this time of 'Escapades' by John Williams. Yes, that John Williams. It's based on music from the soundtrack to the film "Catch me if you can", and is basically an alto saxophone concerto. This was more my kind of music. John Williams wrote many of my favourite film soundtracks, and much of his work is iconic. This had all that you'd expect from his music, plus some incredibly funky jazz saxophone solos, accompanied by marimba and double bass. It was played brilliantly by Richard Ingham, the honorary president of the Music Society.

"Scheherazade Went on with Her Story". Illustration from "Arabian Nights" by Virginia Frances Sterrett (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

After the break we performed one of my favourite orchestral works: Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. This was one of the first orchestral works that I ever saw performed live by a professional orchestra. My Mum took me to see it at the Corn Exchange in Bedford, and I remember sitting in the 5th row enraptured by the beautifully lyrical music. If you've never heard it, give it a listen. This is the second time I've played the piece, and sadly also the second time that someone else has played the prominent bassoon solos in the second movement. The cadenza's I'm not bothered by; I've tried to play them before, and never really got my fingers around them. But the solo tune is one of the few that I would absolutely love to perform. Dan, the 1st bassoon, did a decent job of it and his tone and pitch were great, but he was breathing in all sorts of odd places, and obviously struggling to break free of the strict time. In any case, the orchestra pulled off a wonderful performance. We again recorded it on my laptop, and after listening back to it this afternoon I'm very proud of what we achieved.