“Danza de las Hachas” is the third of four movements from Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Fantasia para un gentilhombre,” a concerto for guitar and orchestra. This piece was arranged for Karen Marcello on the flute, with a twenty-piece chamber orchestra by orchestra.net in Prague, recorded in New York over video conference.
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The seventh track on my SoundCloud Playlist is “Danza de las Hachas” by Karin Marcello.
This recording was included on Karin Marcello’s “Vision” CD, released in 2010. Karin is a flutist and composer from Long Island.
“Danza de las Hachas” is the third of four movements from Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Fantasia para un gentilhombre,” a concerto for guitar and orchestra. Rodrigo’s orchestration was for piccolo, flute, oboe, bassoon, trumpet, guitar and strings. Karin asked me to arrange this piece for flute and chamber orchestra for her CD. We chose orchestra.net (Prague) as the orchestra recording company. I had to choose the instruments for a 20 piece chamber orchestra that would be able to play pieces by Bach, Mozart and Chopin, in addition to Rodrigo. All of the pieces required strings – 1st violins, 2nd violins, violas, cellos, and bass(es). We were using the original scores to the Mozart and Bach pieces, so, in addition to the strings, we needed 2 oboes and 2 french horns for Mozart and a harpsichord for Bach. For my new arrangements of the Chopin and Rodrigo pieces I wanted to use as many of the available musicians as possible, so I included the oboes and horns for Chopin and Rodrigo and the piano for Rodrigo. The harpsichord player played piano.
The following instruments were included in the ensemble for the recording session:
- 2 oboes
- 2 horns
- 1 keyboard (harpsicord/piano)
- 5 1st violins
- 4 2nd violins
- 3 violas
- 2 cellos
- 1 bass
For my arrangement, the strings played basically what Rodrigo wrote for the strings, and I orchestrated the flute (Karin), oboes, horns and piano to cover what the other instruments played.
In order to prepare for our session with orchestra.net, I had to upload pdf files of the scores and parts for all the pieces, to their server. They printed everything out over there. During the recording session, I was on the phone with Steve Salani (founder of orchestra.net, in California) and also the conductor, Adam Klemens (in Prague) and was able to talk to them in between takes. I saw and heard the orchestra playing on my computer. Karin was here in my studio with me and my neighbor, Tim Ouimette, came by to check out the session as well. The next day, I downloaded the audio files from the orchestra.net server and then I edited and mixed the orchestra tracks in my studio.
At a later date, Karin and I went to BiCoastal Music, a beautiful recording studio in Ossining, NY, to add her flute parts to the orchestra tracks. Except for the orchestra, we recorded the entire CD there. One session was for flute and piano, another session was for flute and harp, and the third session was to record a few solo flute pieces and to overdub Karin’s flute parts to the orchestra tracks that were recorded in Prague. I chose BiCoastal Music primarily because of the recital hall-like acoustics of the live room, and the Steinway D piano. Around the same time we were recording there, musicians from the New York Philharmonic were also recording a chamber music CD…
Once all of the parts were recorded, I edited, mixed and mastered the album in my studio.
For more info about Karin Marcello, please visit her website: www.karinmarcello.com