Last week, just one day after the end of the International Trombone Festival, the 10th annual Pokorny Low Brass Seminar started up on the UoR campus. The complete opposite of the 5 ring circus that was the ITF, this very intimate week in studying low brass with top notch folks was cooked up by my hubby and Gene Pokorny (Chicago Symphony tubist who went to UoR for a couple of years many moons ago) 10 years ago. A mixture of college age and professional low brass players spend the week taking master classes and being coached in a low brass section by some awesome low brass players, along with listening to talks about what the faculty think are “important things” and hearing them play recitals. Sadly, Gene fell and hit his head and hip very badly just a few days before and couldn’t travel. Here’s the whole group:
I got to hear all the faculty recitals, here’s hubby playing in his:
Detroit Symphony bass trombonist brought us the coolest pizza cutter tool EVER!
We went out for a drink and mexican food that evening and had a lot of fun:
Here are a couple of pictures of the faculty playing some section excerpts and rehearsing chamber music:
As it came to a close, we hosted the faculty and Andrew’s grad students to pizza in order to celebrate the end of Pokorny #10. It was great to have Liam’s Vanderbilt Trombone teacher Jeremy Wilson join the group, (even though Liam had to get back to Aspen music festival and couldn’t be there) and super cool to at last meet Tim Higgins’ wife Sharon. I was super busy cooking pizzas so didn’t get a pic with Sergio Carolino in it, and although Randy had to leave a couple days early (Detroit Symphony is touring China right now), we all really enjoyed attacking the pizza with the new tool he gave us!
The next day, hubby and I wanted to do something fun with his students to say thank you for all their hard work during the past two weeks, so we had them over for a pasta party, where he taught them how to make a red sauce and 2 kinds of ravioli completely from scratch!
All I did was make a couple of cheesecake galettes, watch them learn, and eat some incredible food!
And now, I can emerge a bit from the world of trombone and re-enter the world of Candied Fabrics! Wahoo!