I just got a very nice note from a member of the myauditions community telling me how much he ‘enjoyed’ my blog, using the past tense a couple of more times- which reminded me that it’s been two months since my last entry. (I checked the site just to be sure I’m still listed!)

I’ve got some other music-biz topics to cover at another date, but today I’m just going to fill in the personal highlights of my last couple of months:

June 4th- bassoon quartet concert @ Hawaii Public Radio, repeat June 22 @ the Kamehameha Schools.

July 1-14 College tour with my daughter

July 15- 30 Hawaii Opera Theater ‘King & I’ run, 10 services.

The quartet concert was a lot of fun and we got a nice recording out of it as well. Some day we’re going to patch it up and maybe try to sell a few copies. Bassoon quartets are surprisingly popular- the last three concerts sold out! We’re hoping to continue with the annual concert tradition.

The King and I was pretty routine, a bit long at a little over three hours, and with the interesting wrinkle of casting Richard Chamberlain as the King. The music by Richard Rogers was great and my wife and I are still complaining that the tunes are haunting our brains still, almost a week later. It sure feels good to be back at work, even for ten services. (Thirty weeks, the current HSO season length, is just too short, not only for financial reasons, but also for artistic and physical reasons too. Hopefully the season will get longer in the next contract- which expired in June.)

The college tour was a brisk one- we went to 16 Universities, traveling in 13 states in 14 days, driving over 3,000 miles. Here’s the list of schools we visited (in order)- U. C. Santa Cruz, Stanford U., U. Maryland, U. Virginia, U. Richmond, Duke, U N C Chapel Hill, Elon, Emory, Vanderbilt, U. Ohio (@Athens), Columbia U. N Y U, Princeton, Goucher, U S C (LA). Still no front-runner for her, but she did seem to like Goucher a lot (it’s a small school in Towson, Maryland). At least she got an idea of what’s out there, having lived in Hawaii all of her life and not traveling a whole lot other than to Grandparents houses on the mainland.

On top of all that we’ve launched into a major house renovation, including a new roof, new front and back doors, bay window, new tub, subdividing a larger room into two rooms thus creating a new bedroom, waterproofing the new bedroom (it flooded this spring during our 42 days of flooding last spring), finishing my wife’s teaching studio cottage in the back yard, etcetera etcetera etcetera .......(as the King said) I know I’m forgetting something but you get the idea.

I have yet to get to the beach this summer. Next week maybe. And there’s always next season’s reeds to start. Maybe tomorrow!

One more fun event last month was a visit from my ol’ Cleveland Institute classmate Stefan de Leval Jezierski, who has been a high horn player with the Berlin Phil as long as I’ve been here in Hawaii. We haven’t seen each other since he left Cleveland for Germany almost thirty years ago. Although we’ve written and phoned each other a few times over the years, for this trip he and his wife were taking a trip around the world, having gone from Berlin to Sapporo (Japan) for the Pacific Music Festival. To get the package deal they ‘had’ to make four stops around the world, so they decided to stop in Hawaii, San Francisco and then to North Carolina to see his family. In order to find me, he googled my name and this blog here at myauditions.com came up, so thereby he was able to send me an e-mail. Thanks, myauditions!

Stefan, if you’re reading this now, we had a great time at all the Thai Restaurants, & we’ll see you in Berlin one of these years!

One last note: FINALLY the Honolulu Symphony has hired an executive director, a Mr. Tom Gulick. Additionally, the board has substantially changed membership including a new board chair. So, for the moment at least, hope has sprung again as it eternally does.