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The Riverside Parlor Series (aka the Castleman Concerts) Kicks Off

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How cool is this? Across the street in the middle of nowhere (in the main house of the 311 acre farm over there) there’s a new concert series budding. So incredible to have world class musicians perform just up the hill! Don’t tell anyone that we drove over both times since it was 94 degrees outside.

The Riverside Parlor Series is a dream of Barbara and Adam’s involving the beautifully renovated River House. The house has only had four owners since 1790.

We went to both performances, the first flute and piano and the second, two flutes.

The music was excellent.

Friday 8.15: Barbara O’Brien and Rodrigo Ojeda

Your host Adam Foster.

I particularly love the Poulenc. Here is an unretouched rough recording.


The piano plays the Moonlight Sonata by itself.

Sunday 8.17: Barbara O’Brien and Julie McGough


Fine Lines was composed by a then 9 year old Natalie Joachim (and honestly you can kind of discern that) who later became a member of Eighth Blackbird

We are looking forward to the next Castleman Concert.

Creating a New Art Form

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Eight of us have convened in Rialmosso, Italia to create some art together.  Sadly, three of us were almost immediately infected with COVID from the trip across the ocean.  So far, the other five of us are healthy and working together to create, well, something.  Here’s how that is going.

We have a movement artist, a painter, and three musicians.  For one section of the show we are performing this Sunday we’ve decided on an art form where we pass a token between us, one after another (and sometimes to a group).  The idea is for each artist to improvise in their medium given what the artist before them came up with in another medium.

This set of videos shows our second attempt at this performance game.

It all starts with April Claggett

 

Who passes the token to Rhine Singleton (uncharacteristically playing the dobro).

 

Who passes the token to Sogol Shirazi.

 

Who, uh oh, passes the token to me (Gary McGraw).  Fortunately, I was unable to film myself playing the violin.  (Though you can find some video on Rhine’s blog Blame it on Sally.)

Now that Matt Savage has joined us on the piano, we have five players.  This is an interesting experiment that we’re having fun with.

 

Ready…

Set…

Go…

We are also performing some classical music.  Here is some Vivaldi being worked up.  Sogol will dance to this once we figure it out.

A more pedantic video of the Vivaldi sessions.

There is Bach being worked up, and Chopin too.

 

And we’re spicing up some Where’s Aubrey tunes with simultaneous art and dance.

The incredible result of one of our improvisations

Our time together at Villa Emma has been filled with ideas, collaboration, and the joy of creating something together.