Baroque and Beyond

Here's the very official picture of Baroque and Beyond. Most of the rest of this is just a little excuse to put up the "outtakes" of our picture session. It's really hard to get even a remotely decent nighttime picture in our house, because there's NO LIGHT. And when there is some light, the background is so cluttered, it's almost impossible to take a picture.

Yesterday we got together for our second full group rehearsal. This is a fun group to play with, and of course it was organized by Kathy, who has a real talent for getting people to do musical things. Kathy plays baroque and modern flute and recorders, as does Robin, who also plays baroque oboe, bassoon and bass clarinet. Phil plays violin and Stephen plays cello. The five of us are calling ourselves Baroque and Beyond and will be playing a concert on the Music At Noon series at Westminster Presbyterian Church on February 3rd. We've got the music picked out and have gone through everything about twice or three times,but right now we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there, as they say. Robin was supposed to play continuo on bassoon for one piece, but he left his reeds at home, so couldn't do that one. A likely story.
After the rehearsal, we tried to take a picture (because Westminster always wants a picture for the performers of the week). I think we'll use the picture at the top, but the rest of these are the outtakes. First of all, we had trouble finding a place where the background wasn't too cluttered. So we thought we'd do it on the stairway. Didn't seem to work very well, because there wasn't enough natural light and the flash didn't reach everybody. Then when it did, it reflected off everybody's glasses. Then we tried having John (our photographer) stand on the stairs and we'd look up at him. I thought this would be nice, because there are no visible double chins this way, but it didn't look all that good either -- again, mostly because of not enough light. Then we moved into the living room, but that move ended up with a really cluttered background from the big painting over the fireplace. Finally we got a sort of decent one around the harpsichord, though there are still two people in the picture with halos.