Music, Life, Etc.

Home of the Rowes (or, at least, one subset of that semi-crowded set)

Needham, Massachusetts
http://the-rowes.com

Courtney and Ethan's Voice Recital

On October 13, 2007, we gave our first (and only?) voice recital. We had been studying with Tom Jones (a baritone who teaches at Harvard University and is a regular soloist with Newton Choral Society), and our long-term interest in such a recital combined with Tom's encouragement resulted in the mustering of courage sufficient to the task.

We hired Ben Green, the rehearsal accompanist (and occasional performance accompanist) for NCS to handle the piano duties. The program consisted mostly of Schumann lieder, along with some Courtney originals. In addition, "The Lost Girl" was based on a simple arrangement from Anonymous Four's album "Gloryland" (which includes fiddle accompaniment, while we did ours unaccompanied and with some simple additional vocal harmonies).

It is uncertain if we'll do this sort of thing again any time soon, as it was really a tremendous amount of work to prepare and cost a small fortune. Nevertheless, we're both quite glad to have done it, and feel like it was a great experience overall. Certainly it is most helpful to hear one's own singing in a performance setting, as that can more clearly illustrate to a singer the particular issues said singer's voice teacher may repeatedly note in successive lessons. (A certain tenor needs to relax his jaw and get those vowels taller still.)

Program and Recordings

The recording was made with a digital video camera; while the absolute sound quality is decent, the positioning of the microphone is such that the piano is considerably louder in the overall mix than was the case in the actual room. So it goes. It seemed like a good place for the camera to me.

Recordings are offered in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. If you are unfortunate enough to be a Windows user, you probably should just use MP3. If possible, use Ogg Vorbis because it's free (as in speech).

First half:

Second half: