So Many Instruments, So Little Time!

The Colors Of The Rainb…oboe (Yeah. Wow, that’s bad.) If you’re an American oboist, chances are you play a Loree, have at some point played a Loree, or have at least been told “You know, you should really buy a Loree.”  For a very long time, this was good advice…the universe of the oboe maker was a very small one (quantum, really), and much like getting your coffee at Starbucks, if you bought a Loree you had a very good idea of what you were getting, and you were probably going to like it. (After all, they’ve been making oboes since 1881!) I won’t go into great detail about the history of Francois Loree and his oboes, because there are five million other places you can look online and read about it; and frankly, they probably do a better job of it than I would. My point is simply that for most of the 20th century, if you played the oboe, and you played the oboe with any remote degree of seriousness, your option in fine oboes was Loree. Toward the middle of the 20th...

Last weekend (12/1/2012), I had the pleasure of attending the Richmond Flute Fair while I was in town performing with the national tour of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" at the Landmark Theater (a bit of irony, since in this show, I do not play the flute at all!). I actually had no idea that the flute fair was taking place until late the night before when I saw a post about it on the Nagahara Facebook page. Of course, I HAD to go, and fortunately, the vendors were in the lobby and no registration was needed to visit the vendor tables. The fair was small in terms of number of vendors, but there was an amazingly fantastic array of stock...I was like a kid in a candy store.  (A very, very expensive candy store…) The tables I divided my day between were the Flutist's Faire, (the lovely and fabulous Betsy Trimber, proprietress), which had the largest number of flutes and headjoints, the Nagahara table, which had only 3 flutes and 6 headjoints, but what fabulous flutes the...