Tag/category: Music
West Side Story band: high notes and lows
Of everything, the issue of the band is the most polar experience of putting on a show like West Side Story; in equal amounts great delight and intense despair. Summarised, it is clearly a joy and a privilege for any musician to conduct a band (read: orchestra) that is even approaching the full-size scoring of West Side Story (even West …
Read more
Directing West Side Story — your life will never be the same
Be prepared for one thing, if nothing else: being a music director (or producer or choreographer) for a show, will disrupt your life, your relationships, your career (assuming you have a separate one), your social life, probably your sex life (assuming you have one), your diet, probably your driving skills and just about anything else you care to mention. Be …
Read more
West Side Story piano reduction: rehearsal pianist or learn it yourself?
The short answer is: yes to both. Having gone back and forth over that decision for five months, and having ended up doing both, I can now see that — assuming you have reasonable keyboard skills – it’s the only way. Basically, we didn’t have budget to pay anyone, and this is firmly the most preposterous thing about our production. …
Read more
West Side Story – music directing the show
I’ve lost count of the number of times I take up a new project with the intention of setting up a dedicated blog to record my experiences — be it starting out freelance, designing an Intranet (still hoping to do this one actually!), running a marathon or music directing (MD-ing) a stage show – but never get round to it …
Read more
Ian Carpenter 40th birthday concert party!
Well it’s been over 6 months since this event, and a commentary on it, together with recordings from the concert, are long overdue. I shall hopefully do the commentary before the New Year, but the easy bit was posting the downloads, and I thought that deserved to be done before Christmas. So, here are the indvidual tracks or else you …
Read more
