Easter Round-Up

I hope everyone (who wanted to, that is) had a very Happy Easter.

I'm pleased to say that ushering wasn't anywhere near as bad as I had feared. Everyone behaved themselves quite well and I had no occasion to either glare, confiscate cell phones or wang people over the backs of their heads with the collection plate.

After Church, we tooled down to my Godparents' place outside of Fredericksburg. We had lunch with them and a couple of their friends, including the artistic director of the Fredericksburg Music Festival. She turned out to be way cool from a musical standpoint - a professional harpist herself, she seems to have met and known an awful lot of the big guns in the world of professional classical music.

One thing for those of you who are especially fond of Baroque music - I've long been a fan of the English Concert and have many recordings of them under the direction of Trevor Pinnock. Well apparently, Pinnock recently stepped down and the EC now has been taken over by the violinist Andrew Manze. My table companion saw them in concert in New York over the winter and tells me they have burst out to new heights - They opened their concert with Mozart's Eine kleine Nacthmusick and despite that piece's status as hackneyed, past-mark-of-mouth-warhorse, their performance left her amazed and delighted.

Anyhoo, my new friend has promised to send me some recent CD's of the English Concert's work under Manze. If so, I'll let you know what I think.