Yew Sunday - CMSA 2020 - Telemann

 

Yew Sunday (mp3) (pdf)

Telemann - Con Tenerezza - TWV 41:D3 (mp3) (pdf)

It's been a busy few weeks, despite the ongoing 2020 Troubles.

Last weekend was the amazingly inspiring online version of our annual Classical Mandolin Society of America convention. This all volunteer organization put together an impressive program of workshops, concerts, meetings and Zoom hangouts that convincingly simulated the real thing. I got to visit with old friends without catching anything or infecting anyone. I learned quite a bit and played a lot of mandolin.

I was especially honored that CMSA chose my mandolin orchestra piece "Heavens On Earth" as the material for this year's virtual en masse orchestra. We all practiced in advance, had a sectional workshop on Sunday and then "performed" the piece together in real time by playing along with a video. Even though we weren't in the same physical space it sure felt to me like we were playing together. The plan is for everyone to submit videos of themselves playing along, post-convention, and a technical wizard will compile these into one of the giant Zoom videos that you see online.

One of the highlights of any CMSA convention are the open mic performances. This year people video recorded themselves, or their groups, and we all got to watch the concert from the comfort of our homes. I was able to be a part of two open mic performances: 

My friends in the Minnesota Mandolin Orchestra invited me to join them in a recording of "Epilogue", a beautiful piece by Enrique Granados, arranged for mandolin orchestra by MMO conductor Lon Hendricks. I was especially happy to see that my old friend Marilynn Mair was also a guest member of the group for this video.

In addition I was invited to join in with my old friends, and regular open mic favorites, the Mandobabes in creating a video performance of my own piece "Halfway Home." Everyone played beautifully and made my piece look and sound great. All in all a wonderful convention experience.

I finally made some time this morning to do a little recording. First I recorded a short piece from Telemann's sonata no. 4 of his Sonate Metodiche collection. This is a great bunch of music and I have a nice, sturdy hardcover book of the whole set. This particular piece doesn't appear in either of my Mel Bay published Telemann collections (there is so much great Telemann music to choose from) but I've been playing this almost every day for the last month. I created a 2nd mandolin part from the original bass line of the piece.

I recorded "Yew Sunday" back in the spring in a video but here I am finally getting around to re-recording it with guitar backup. In fact, just for fun, I used two guitars playing basically the same thing. As always, I hope you enjoy the music!