BLOG (EN)The Fairie-round (Holborne) – Alto Recorder Play-AlongAnthony Holborne (c.1545–1602) was a gentleman-musician at the court of Elizabeth I and one of the finest English composers for lute and cittern. In 1599 he published Pavans, Galliards, Almains and other Short Aeirs, a collection of 65 dances in five parts for “viols, violins or other musicall…

BLOG (EN)Caprice II (Quantz) – Alto Recorder Play-AlongJohann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773) was the most famous flautist of the 18th century. He was flute teacher and court composer to Frederick the Great of Prussia, wrote hundreds of flute concertos and sonatas, and published the influential treatise Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752). His…

Trong họ gia đình recorder, Alto recorder (được chia theo giọng Fa / F pitch) giữ một vị trí đặc biệt quan trọng. Nếu Soprano recorder là chiếc sáo quen thuộc ở trường học với âm sắc cao vút, thì Alto lại được coi là nhạc cụ trung tâm và chuẩn mực nhất dành cho việc trình…

BLOG (EN)Swan Lake (Swan Theme) – Alto Recorder Play-AlongSwan Lake, Op. 20, was Tchaikovsky’s first ballet. It premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877 to a lukewarm reception, and only after the composer’s death did the 1895 St Petersburg revival by Petipa and Ivanov make it the most famous ballet in the world.…

BLOG (EN)Für Elise – Alto Recorder Play-AlongFür Elise is Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A minor, WoO 59, probably written around 1810. It was not published until 1867, forty years after the composer’s death, when the scholar Ludwig Nohl found the manuscript. Nobody knows for sure who “Elise” was: candidates include the singer Elisabeth Röckel and Therese…

BLOG (EN)Oh My Darling, Clementine – Alto Recorder Play-AlongOh My Darling, Clementine is a ballad of the American West, set in the California Gold Rush. It tells of a “miner, forty-niner” and his daughter Clementine. The words were published in 1884 and credited to Percy Montrose, and the tune may come from the earlier song…

BLOG (EN)Danny Boy (Londonderry Air) – Alto Recorder Play-AlongThe Londonderry Air is one of the most famous melodies in the world. It was first written down in County Londonderry in the 1850s and published in George Petrie’s collection of Irish music in 1855. In 1913 the English lawyer and lyricist Frederic Weatherly fitted his poem…

O Canada – Alto Recorder Play-AlongO Canada was composed by Calixa Lavallée in 1880 for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations in Quebec City, first with French words by Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English version by R. Stanley Weir (1908) became the best known, and the song was officially adopted as Canada’s national anthem in 1980. It is…

Kimigayo (君が代) – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – “Kimigayo” sets a classical waka poem from the 10th-century Kokin Wakashū anthology to a melody by court musician Hayashi Hiromori (1880), harmonised by Franz Eckert. It is one of the shortest anthems in the world, only 11 bars long. Its melody uses a traditional Japanese mode, so…

Hatikvah – Alto Recorder Play-Along EN – “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) sets words written by Naftali Herz Imber in 1878 to a melody arranged by Samuel Cohen in 1888. Cohen based it on “La Mantovana”, a 16th-century Italian tune by Giuseppe Cenci. The same family of melodies is also heard in Smetana’s “Vltava” and in many…