Musicians of the Old Post Road

Frederick The Great's 300th Birthday is January 24!

Come join us for a musical celebration (complete with Birthday cake) for our next concerts, Friday, March 9 at 8:00 at the First Parish in Wayland and Saturday, March 10 at 3:00 at Old South Church in Boston. Tickets available here.

Third grade students at the Hurley School in Boston were treated to a performance and educational presentation about canons, scales, and other musical topics by the ensemble on Thursday, November 10. Music of Bach and Marais from the ensemble’s Riddle Me This program provided excellent material for demonstration.

A participatory singing of the familiar round “Row, row, row your boat” was used as launching point to explain the canon form (“canon with only two n’s, not three,” explained co-Artistic Director Suzanne Stumpf.) Students were next charmed by Sarah Darling’s demonstration of how to sing the song in inversion (upside down) and in retrograde (backwards). The inverted parts of Bach’s Goldberg Canons 3 and 5 were then introduced and combined. Bach’s crab canon from the Musical Offering (which uses a retrograde voice) was also performed.

This mini blog chronicles the process of recording our newest CD. The recording sessions are taking place at Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, a beautiful Gothic style church with resonant acoustics, providing a suitable soundscape for this Italian Baroque repertoire.

May 23, 2011 - Day 1: Setup, sound check, and start of recording
 

The goals for our first day are to get a sound check for all of the ensemble configurations on the CD. Our recording engineer Christopher Greenleaf set up a pair of omnidirectional microphones centered in front of the ensemble and it was our task to position ourselves in such ways as is to get the optimal sound for each piece.

As many of our concert-goers are aware, every season Musicians of the Old Post Road researches and performs musical works that have been lost to audiences for centuries. This work involves the procurement of copies of the original source material and, more often than not, transcription of the scores to a more readable, practical modern edition for the performers.

Many of our audience members have asked us about this process, so we thought we would describe in detail how the cantata Amor di che tu voi by Giovanni Lulier (which we performed on our Roman Handel program) was procured, transcribed, and edited.

On May 13 the ensemble was featured on 99.5 All Classical WGBH's Live from Fraser show. The ensemble performed a quartet by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, a cello sonata by Raynor Taylor, and a Paris Quartet by Georg Philipp Telemann. Brian McCreath hosted the show and engaged the musicians in a discussion of the music, period instruments and the ensemble's history and future plans. The show is now available on demand on the WGBH website.