A most fun day! Recently Martin Perkins (www.conservatoire.bcu.ac.uk/profiles/martin-perkins) contacted me about collaborating on a podcast. Martin has done sterling work cataloguing the instrument collection at the Birmingham Conservatoire (www.conservatoire.bcu.ac.uk/hic) and is in the process of producing a series of podcasts each of which will focus "on an instrument or group of instruments, examining changes in construction and design and how musicians and composers responded to and initiated these changes". Martin and the Conservatoire had recently hosted the Galpin Society AGM (www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/galpin) and the wonderful Andy Lamb from the equally wonderful Bate Collection (www.bate.ox.ac.uk) kindly invited us to Oxford for the day to play with their instruments! The results of today will hopefully be a podcast plus a series of short videos.
One of the many treats of today was playing on a silver Marcel-Auguste Raoux Cor-Solo from 1823. It really was a beauty. It made me even more intrigued about the Raoux in the Paris collection as the two instruments are probably not dissimilar.
