Download this movement (mp3, 10.1 MB)
Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (i: Allegro con moto) by Matthew Charles Weiss
Download this movement (mp3, 10.1 MB)
During the course of this project, I made the rather bold (let's leave it at that, shall we? :-) decision to conduct the performance myself, having never conducted a full symphony orchestra performance in the past. This can be evidenced by the set of tails that I'm wearing that don't quite fit, especially the vest which I borrowed from my dear friend and talented conductor, Johan Louwersheimer. Happily, the community orchestra that we assembled out of friends and members of the Octava Chamber Orchestra, the Lake Union Civic Orchestra, the Rainier Symphony, and other Seattle groups, did a fine job on very few rehearsals, despite the huge challenges of working the kinks out of a brand new work, a newbie conductor, and a last movement that had some inherent notational problems that we simply had to live with for lack of time.
If that weren't enough strikes against us, our soloist who had been working on the clarinet part for months, became ill and could not play the concert. So at the last minute, Jeff Brooks stepped in and learned the whole thing in 3 days, included his own beautiful cadenzas, rehearsed it for the first time an hour and a half before the show, and gave an absolutely miraculous performance.
Bravo to everyone involved!
Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (complete, with video and score)
info@OctavaChamberOrchestra.com
The calligraphic ornament above is based on a fourteenth-century design detail appearing in Plate No. 11 of W. R. Tymms, The Art of Illuminating as Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times ... (London: Day and Son, 1860.) The roundel frames above were derived from a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript depicting the "Vision of Isaiah" attributed to Girolamo Da Cremona, now housed in the Libreria Piccolomini, Duomo, Siena.