when the cat's away ...

Cowley Orchestra runs on a no-commitment policy which we take seriously, so everybody including our part-time conductors can be absent any time. These last two weeks it so happened that we had no serving conductors, so the task of picking music out of our library of 400 pieces fell to me. I went through the database and put some effort into my selections (which I also documented on Mastodon and Facebook), so here comes the summary after two weeks (normal service should resume on Wed). Title links lead to youtube videos of other people's performances, which I have also added to a new playlist:

25.9.

1. Just one cornetto - although it says "O sole mio" on the sheet music which is probably a lot older than the Cornetto ad.
2. Albert Ketelbey, In a monastery garden. I actually discovered Ketelbey through playing another piece of his at Cowley (have that one lined up for next week):
3. Cosi fan tutte Ouverture (Mozart). Based on our no-commitment policy, we have a lot of experience in playing orchestral pieces with whatever instruments turn up on the night, even if it's only 7 and no violin. So it's good to see professionals also like to play (and even record) these pieces with smaller ensembles, in this case just 5 wind players.
4. Handel Suite No. 1. No this is not the famous water music, it is Handel's keyboard suite arranged for orchestra by the founder of our ensemble and collector of much of its music library, Henry Gosling. I tend to moan when I see the handwritten dots but the flip side is that this arrangement is a unique piece of music that probably doesn't exist anywhere else.
5. As we have a few lovers of #musicals in the ensemble, we return to this selection of tunes from Oklahoma! fairly regularly, maybe once a term.
6. Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances (Prince Igor). Borodin was obviously very important because he was both a chemist and a composer. We had a go at the Prince Igor dances before running out of time - may help to study the dance video to get a feeling for the spirit of the piece.

2.10.

1. 'Souvenir de France' by Ronald Hanmer - a medley of traditional French songs, some very widely known even in the UK ... Strangely youtube had two different recordings of this by different ensembles but in the same bandstand. I've picked the one which looked a bit sunnier.
2. As promised, here comes the other Ketelbey piece, the one that first introduced me to this composer, In a Persian Market. In this video I love the fact that the English orientalism is diffracted through the prism of a Taiwan orchestra with traditional Chinese instruments and a conductor from Turkmenistan.
3. This week's musical was Showboat by Jerome Kern - also a favourite we play around once per term. There are five selections left which we didn't get round to this week. Next week the conductors are back in charge but maybe they'll take on one of my leftovers in which case I'll highlight thoses as well.

Some other pieces we played on a previous occasion.