Dear Colleague,
To help prepare emotionally, as well as intellectually and musically, for the concert of Baroque, Renaissance, and Traditional music from Spain and Latin America (and one piece of Yaqui Indian origins), a sampling of cuisine from Spain, Mexico, and Argentina was needed.
The menu:
Paella (from Steve Raichlen's Healthy Latin Cuisine), substituting squid rings and bay scallops for the shrimp.
Posole (with blue corn hominy) (After I browned the pork loin chunks I just tossed everything into the slow cooker; may have overdone the Chimayo chile pepper for the taste of some . . . )
Tacos de carne asada (After rolling out a few tortillas by hand, I lost patience and just grabbed a package of the local corn tortillas I always have around, for just such an emergency) A good marinade of lime juice, salt, and olive oil worked well on the meat.
Matambre. This recipe comes from an older Time-Life book we bought at a used book store. The most difficult part is the flaying of the skirt steak. Next time I'm having the butcher do it, or at least make sure my knives are properly sharpened. That is another story for another time . . .
And the blending of cuisines: risotto with Chimayo chile, shiitake mushrooms, and sweet potatoes.
This seems almost redundant given that the paella is the Spanish version of risotto, but this had no seafood in it. The chicken Andouille was the perfect protein for this (and I took it easy on the Chimayo this time).
Yes, this was a ton of food to prepare over a couple of days but the gang pitched in to defer the costs and took care of the clean up.
The program, as usual with these cross-genre events, required me to do all sorts of things that, in theory, I've trained for, but the reality is that I don't get to practice these skills enough. Thanks be to Providence, the music writing software program does some of it for me. With the trad player on the program we went to a=440 Hz, which, as you know, is less-than-ideal for Baroque flutes, so I opted for whole tone transposition for the pieces which used the flute. I switched to recorder for a couple of pieces, and even played the quena on one piece.Add to that the occasional need to improvise an accompaniment in styles of music that are far removed from either Tartini or Quantz in their styles, techniques, and harmonic vocabularies, and you have a flute player on the edge. The edge of what, we cannot say . . .
The concert went well and was not without some shameless grandstanding. For the last piece on the program, an arrangement of Santiago de Murcia's "Folias gallegas," I played an African drum as well as flute, even doing both at the same time on a few occasions when the extemporized aspect of the piece allowed for a drone on the tonic note while I beat a rhythm on the drum.
Next time this program happens, I'll make sure you are on the gig. We had too many leftovers and not enough flute players.
y.m.h.&o.s.,
quantzalcoatl