Playalong Midsummer Duet

 Dear Flutelovers,

 Over on the FLUTElist Jon Raybould has announced an opportunity to play a duet of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream with a famous historical flutist from France! I say go for it! So fun. Here's what Jon says about his playalong creation:

 Jon wrote: "I've made a YouTube video of the "Scherzo" from Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", arranged for flute duet. It's from "Méthode de flûte" by Joseph-Henri Altès, and essentially, it's the same as the duet featured at the end of "Album of Flute Duets" (Louis Moyse).

However, on this video you hear a recording of just the FLUTE 2 part, played by the late Fernand Caratgé (1902–1991), a prominent French flutist of the 20th century.

The idea is that you follow the score appearing on the YouTube screen and play along with the Flute 1 part!! All for free!

This is a collaboration between myself and Chris Steward, collector of, and expert on,classic flute recordings. 

I've been working on it for a few months. Here's what happened:

1. Chris posted on the Flute List about the "Méthode de flûte" by Joseph-Henri Altès. He was editing some pages of Part 3, and gave the link to it on IMSLP.

2. I noticed that in this Method, there was the Midsummer Night's Dream Scherzo flute duet that appeared to be the same as the one in the Louis Moyse Duet book. In my teaching days, I played it zillions of times with my advanced students.

3. Chris then emailed me, out of interest, an old recording that Fernand Caratgé had made, to illustrate the Altès Methode. (Caratgé had spent time revising and editing the Altès Methode for publication...)...

4. So an idea came to me - to use my video editing skills and produce this play-along video for advanced players to play along to. I've made it, so the lines of the music appear magically on the screen (no need for page turns!) .. Plus, I've added yellow blocks on the screen which flash in time with the beat, to help players keep in time. (Best viewed on a large screen via a desktop computer).

I've added some background information at the end of the video, including information about Chris Steward's "Early Flute Recordings" pages on the Robert Bigio site.

If you have the duet in printed form, of course you can use that if you can't play along to the YouTube screen.

And here's a tip - for practising, you can slow down the YouTube playback easily. Below the video, click on the "cog" icon. From there you can choose a speed from x 0.25, through to normal speed.. YouTube does a pretty good job of reducing the playback speed whilst maintaining the correct pitch.

Here's the whole video: (video)

 Direct link to the start of the play-along section.

Here's the direct link to the "background info." section toward the end of the video. 

I included an excerpt of a performance of the orchestral version of the Scherzo, played by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at the end. It is stunning. For the complete performance, here's the video link (Bravo to the flute section).

Best wishes, Jon Raybould"