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At the last minute, I bought a ticket to see Paul O'Dette play at a church downtown. Though he's on the faculty at Eastman, he plays four times a year in Paris, and he plays here once every four years.
He seems to be popular, though, and filled most of the sanctuary, including a three-sided balcony section above. It's a lovely room, with a white pipe organ, some pipes of which resemble background characters in a Disney cartoon. When he started playing, the light tone of his instrument (a modern recreation of an antique) also filled the room as those of us with coughs struggled to keep our layrnxes quiet. His tuning up was more melodious than the playing of, well, I won't name names.
He presented three or four anonymous pieces, then a set of Dowland compositions, including one Dowland wrote upon a galiard of Bacheler. Bacheler was the compositional star of the night. O'Dette had been able to locate a previously unknown stash of Bacheler's works, most of them unheard for centuries. A pre-recital talk from the director of the Pegasus early music society, which had sponsored the presentation, filled me in on a lot of the details.
After the interval (during which I ran out to my car to get my monocular, to compensate for being in the back row), he played a set of Bacheler's fancies, galiards, jiggs, and such. These were a bit more intricate than the Dowland. Where Dowland would ornament with scale passages, Bacheler went for larger intervals and different figures, which one would expect to be more difficult for the performer.
You couldn't tell it from O'Dette's quiet demeanor, though. All challenges seemed equal in his deft fingers. There may have been some sub-vocal sounds coming from him — I couldn't be sure, back where I was — but the tone was musical throughout.
I could contrast it with a violin recital I attended the night before, where the intonation was a little off, pizzicato passages seemed to stick to the strings and cut off the sound, and harmonics that should have soared broke and fell to the ground.
As I left for the reception, I saw that the CDs had sold out entirely, making me glad I'd bought one on the way in. I chose the all-Bacheler disk, and it was on my iPod before I went to bed.
(I wrote a longer review earlier, but this one leaves out a lot of irrelevant stuff that I often seem unable to omit. Edited slightly at 10:30 am.)
.
At the last minute, I bought a ticket to see Paul O'Dette play at a church downtown. Though he's on the faculty at Eastman, he plays four times a year in Paris, and he plays here once every four years.
He seems to be popular, though, and filled most of the sanctuary, including a three-sided balcony section above. It's a lovely room, with a white pipe organ, some pipes of which resemble background characters in a Disney cartoon. When he started playing, the light tone of his instrument (a modern recreation of an antique) also filled the room as those of us with coughs struggled to keep our layrnxes quiet. His tuning up was more melodious than the playing of, well, I won't name names.
He presented three or four anonymous pieces, then a set of Dowland compositions, including one Dowland wrote upon a galiard of Bacheler. Bacheler was the compositional star of the night. O'Dette had been able to locate a previously unknown stash of Bacheler's works, most of them unheard for centuries. A pre-recital talk from the director of the Pegasus early music society, which had sponsored the presentation, filled me in on a lot of the details.
After the interval (during which I ran out to my car to get my monocular, to compensate for being in the back row), he played a set of Bacheler's fancies, galiards, jiggs, and such. These were a bit more intricate than the Dowland. Where Dowland would ornament with scale passages, Bacheler went for larger intervals and different figures, which one would expect to be more difficult for the performer.
You couldn't tell it from O'Dette's quiet demeanor, though. All challenges seemed equal in his deft fingers. There may have been some sub-vocal sounds coming from him — I couldn't be sure, back where I was — but the tone was musical throughout.
I could contrast it with a violin recital I attended the night before, where the intonation was a little off, pizzicato passages seemed to stick to the strings and cut off the sound, and harmonics that should have soared broke and fell to the ground.
As I left for the reception, I saw that the CDs had sold out entirely, making me glad I'd bought one on the way in. I chose the all-Bacheler disk, and it was on my iPod before I went to bed.
(I wrote a longer review earlier, but this one leaves out a lot of irrelevant stuff that I often seem unable to omit. Edited slightly at 10:30 am.)
.
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