The Waterloo Concert Band's Christmas Concert is coming up soon. Since we have a Leroy Anderson theme, I thought I would share a story with you this week.

For our 2008 spring concert, we invited a special guest clarinetist (Afendi Yusuf) to play with the band. Trevor wanted us to play Rhapsody in Blue, which has quite an amazing and difficult clarinet part, so having a clarinet prodigy with us for the concert was essential.

Since Afendi was there, Trevor selected two other relatively difficult clarinet-centric pieces for the concert: Clarinet on the Town, and The Typewriter, by Leroy Anderson. At the time, I had recently been "promoted" to the first chair 1st clarinet position, because Roberta (who normally occupies that position) was on leave from the band due to the birth of her daughter. I was relatively comfortable because I knew that Afendi would be playing all of the solos, so I could "relax" and just hang back on the 1st clarinet part. During rehearsals I would play the solo clarinet parts just to provide a frame of reference for the band, but I didn't spend that much time polishing them since I knew that Afendi would be there for the concert.

Of course, you can probably see where this story is going. On the day of the concert, Afendi showed up and everything was going according to plan. He did an amazing job playing Rhapsody in Blue and Clarinet on the Town in the first half of the program. Then, during intermission, he got a phone call from the KW symphony asking him to join them for a rehearsal. Well, when you are an aspiring young clarinetist, playing with the symphony is quite important. So, Afendi left, leave me as the solo clarinetist for the second half of the concert.

Luckily for me, the two hardest pieces were out of the way, but we still had to play The Typewriter, which is essentially one big typewriter + violin solo that had been transcribed for the clarinet. Having to play The Typewriter in concert with virtually no notice is definitely one of the most interesting memories I have from the last 12 years with the Waterloo Concert Band. As luck(?) would have it, one of our audience members happened to be recording the concert at the time, so my last minute attempt at The Typewriter has been preserved for all eternity on the internet. You can listen to it here.

For this upcoming concert, Roberta is back in the first chair position, so she will be playing The Typewriter. Meanwhile I will be "hanging back" on the E-flat clarinet, mostly relaxing. That is the plan, anyway. To find out if everything goes according to plan, make sure to attend our concert on December 8th at 2pm!

Technical Details: This photo was taken with my 5D Mark II + Tamron 28-75 at ISO 100, f/16 at various shutter speeds (I took multiple exposures and did an HDR merge using Photoshop).

Comments

Very brave!