NAVRS October Playing Meeting with Rainer Beckmann

Wind, or Air in Motion

Briefly after I had graduated from Utrecht Conservatory in the mid-1990s, my former music school teacher, Karin Röhrig, published a collection of pentatonic songs for the soprano recorder (Edition Moeck 2134) with the poetic title ..und die Flöte verwandelt den Wind in ein Lied... (...and the flute turns the wind into a song...). The phrase is part of a short poem Karin had written that beautifully speaks of how a song's sound moves and connects hearts, more than any word could ever do. It all inspired me to put together a program for NAVRS that loosely revolves around Wind, or Air in Motion.

The playlist for the October playing session is going to include a medieval song referring to Boreas, Greek god of the north wind, as well as two madrigals by Orlande de Lassus and Michael Cavendish with references to Greek wind deities. Further on the playlist will be a Passecaille by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, an Handel Air, and a weathercock fugue by the Brazilian composer Fernando Mattos. A canon in 16 parts by Hans Ulrich Staeps, dedicated to my former recorder teacher in Germany, will wrap up the playlist.