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John Williams Tuba Concerto - 1994 (24 hours download only)

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 12:21 pm
by bloke
sigh...
I'm only putting a free website's 24-hour download link here...I'm not that sure that I want it on my youtube "channel"...

I need to make several excuses for the orchestra.
- This was an amateur orchestra that hired several ringers for two rehearsals and the concerts.
- This piece was way too hard for that orchestra, and it shouldn't have been attempted, though the amateurs worked VERY hard.
- The concert coincided with the week of the famous Memphis ice storm of 1994 https://www.actionnews5.com/2022/02/09/ ... e-remember , the concert was only two days later, and - thus - the ringers only attended a dress rehearsal (as the one the DAY OF the ice storm had to be cancelled), and were offered ONE run-through of this piece.
- The amateur orchestra's music director (a couple weeks after rehearsals for this concert commencing) was hired with a touring production of Porgy & Bess, and his sibling took over the rehearsals, only ran through it weekly, and didn't fix anything.
- The English horn player was an elderly gentleman who was a music LOVER and NOT really a musician. He bought an expensive English horn only a year prior to this concert, was a rank beginner, took lessons, and worked EXTREMELY hard on that cadenza.

me...??
- I was absolutely SHOCKED that - when the music director returned from his tour (a week prior to this concert) that he was still planning on performing this piece. I STRONGLY advised against it, but he informed me that there wasn't anything to take it's place, and that the concert would end up being too short.
- During the first minute or so of the first movement, I was pretty nervous (not-at-all about my playing, but whether or not we would even make it through the first movement, much less to the end of the piece. After that, the absurdity of the situation occurred to me (should have been obvious, rather than an epiphany), I realized that it just didn't matter, and I (simply) concentrated on my own playing...so my playing improved after that.

There was NO plan to record this, but one of the weaker 2nd violinists had stuck a $19 Walgreens cassette recorder under their chair, and this is what they got (sometimes, hard to hear the tuba, sometimes way too much bad 2nd violin playing), and they told me that had a cassette recording of this, later.

It is what it is. :eyes:
Some people don't like this piece at all. I guess I played it OK (and fast - c. ♩=150 in the 3rd mvt., because I sorta wanted to get it over with). I sorta DO like the 3rd movement ("devil music"...and in the B-locrian mode, no less). The orchestra stuff is just barely close enough to right whereby you might be able to get some sort of idea of what is really supposed to happen.

Again, this link disappears around lunchtime (USA time) on June 9th.

There's about 5 seconds of dead time at the beginning...This was my FIRST time converting a cassette recording to a digital recording.
There is a messed up place (on the original cassette) for a couple of seconds in the 2nd movement.
Thanks to cktuba for helping me with the gadgetry and sending me to a free conversion program.
https://www.zamzar.com/uploadComplete.p ... 6e&tcs=Z76

Re: John Williams Tuba Concerto - 1994 (24 hours download only)

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:07 pm
by BopEuph
Just listening to this passively; I actually don't know a whole lot of tuba solo literature, including the Williams. It sounds better than you let on!

Interesting choice to go with the mp4 extension for audio. I haven't seen that in years (it's typically reserved for video these days, and m4a has replaced the audio extension). How did you do the conversion?

If you don't mind spending about $180, you could get a Focusrite 2i2, and plug the cassette player into channels 1 and 2 with a splitter. Not that a stereo recording would do great from the position of the recorder, but if you're going to make a habit of converting cassettes to digital audio, this would probably help a lot. Make channel 1 left (pan 100% to the left) and channel 2 right (pan 100% to the right). If you don't have an audio program for editing music, Reaper is free (and $60 if you want to get rid of that "I'm still evaluating" window at startup). The preamps in the interface will probably help the quality of the import, and you can even do some basic tweaking. MP3 would probably be a good file extension, but maybe would sound better with a wav extension (which is lossless). I wouldn't advise this if the cassette conversion is once-in-a-while, but this might be much more convenient and higher quality than whatever you're using. But it's a learning curve, but one that can take you much farther as you learn how to use all this stuff.

And as I finish these thoughts, the piece is coming to its conclusion. Your playing was top notch! And it sounds like the orchestra, at the very least, had a lot of fun performing it. I'm guessing there was a fair number of ringers in there.

Re: John Williams Tuba Concerto - 1994 (24 hours download only)

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:47 pm
by tubanh84
This is great playing. Thank you for posting it.

Re: John Williams Tuba Concerto - 1994 (24 hours download only)

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2022 4:52 pm
by bloke
If anyone else is actually interested enough in this to have wished to listen before the download expired (though I doubt that’s the case), I am willing to do another temporary download. If it is just speak up.
I just don’t think this corporate performance is worthy of sitting within my YouTube (so-called) “channel“.
Again: The orchestra sounds quite … astonishing.