I'm currently teaching myself guitar as a personal project, but I'd like to learn the violin later on. I wonder if learning the violin first would be easier or harder. Amazing play and great performance. Good post!
Dearest Enemy 2012 Studio Cast Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Lorenz Hart Label: New World (reconstruction of Rodgers & Hart's first book musical; show originally opened on September 18, 1925 and ran for 286 performances)
More on Dearest Enemy... I saw an amateur production of this show at the Fashion Institute of Technology many years ago by a troupe that usually performed Gilbert & Sullivan stuff. I was surprised by how entertaining it was and how well such an old piece held up. Most shows from that era are dreadful to sit through. The actors took the work seriously and there were no cute winks and nods to the audience. They played it straight but obviously had a ball doing it. This album does not sound like the Rodgers & Hart many will be familiar with. It was written almost ten years before the outstanding run of musicals that they produced between 1935 and 1942 -- the series of shows Rodgers & Hart are most famous for and their most popular standards come from. Rodgers was only 23 years old when he wrote Dearest Enemy in 1925 and clearly has one foot in the vintage Jerome Kern operetta style with his lilting, almost delicate melodies. New World has a great track record of bringing reconstructed scores to CD. Among past recordings are Rodgers & Hart's Babes In Arms (a tremendous album), Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen and the Gershwin's Tell Me More and Tip-Toes.
Mozart: Oboe Quartet, K370; Divertimento, K251; Adagio, K580a - Heinz Holliger; Orlando Quartet (1984) samples
Philip Glass: Symphony No. 2 - Dennis Russell Davies: Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra; Raschèr Saxophone Quartet (1998) samples
John Adams: Shaker Loops; The Wound-Dresser; Short Ride in a Fast Machine - Marin Alsop: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (2004) samples