Once in a blue moon, I play for some of these Fever Candlelight concerts... a bit of background information for those who don't know. Fever is a huge multinational concert organisation based in Spain that puts on these highly advertised and decently attended Candelight concerts where they darken up a venue, put out hundreds of these electric candles and contract groups to play popular music such as Coldplay, Adele, Taylor Swift, and movie music...

... in some respects, it is really quite slick in operation... and sometimes a little less so. Anyway, if I happen to be in town and the group that does all of these asks... I will tend to do it... it is playing work after all... but if it involves travel and accommodation, then it isn't worth it as it isn't covered in the fee.

Of course, the group that does do this stuff regularly has the 10 or more programs pretty much down pat... they have done it a million times, and their scheduling looks damn impressive! And with that amount of work, it must be a huge earner for the individual players... but that said, it isn't for me...

... still, like I said, if I'm around and I'm free to play, I will still play. The experience is a little strange at first... you are in near darkness, and the first couple of times I did them, I was still the only old-school player using dead-tree music and so I would need a sconce light. Everyone else was using iPads and foot pedals... and so, I've recently gotten a large e-reader that also works with a foot-pad and that works really nicely... plus, it is less power hungry than the full tablets... and the light is less glary on the face! (well, that is the tech-nerd side of me at work!).

So... am a decent rock-star? Well, it is really really really really really different from my specialisation in period performance of Early Music... and pretty much everything they play in these concerts is completely unknown or not really familiar to me (but would probably be at least recognisable to most of the population of Earth!)... but I do enjoy the similarities between this music and some of the ways that we play the earlier stuff. It does seem like modern Classical music got lost in this bridging at some point... as there is much that is more familiar in the rock/pop stuff that relates very closely to our interpretation of Early Music. Definitely modern Classical lost its direction (or more politely, took a different path...) somewhere...

... and I would say... no, I'm probably not a great rock star! I do enjoy playing it, my rhythmic sense for that sort of stuff is a bit shaky at times... but in the end, I don't think I'm terrible. I do try... and sometimes I'm playing with players who do mostly recording studio stuff..... and I do find that there is an interesting difference between people like me (who prefer and stay mostly in the live performance space) and those who sit mostly in the recording space... and that does have to do a bit with how we interpret the blobs on the page and how we shape notes and play with time... definitely, as a live player, we are much more lax with interpreting the blobs and all of the rest of the stuff... these are our tools for creating atmosphere and all of that... but in a studio, you have different demands and requirements, and so you need to be much stricter with the reading. I think I would make for a pretty horrible studio musician! I already know that I'm hideously uncomfortable in a modern symphonic setting!

Anyway... if nothing else, I do enjoy larping as a rock star... even if I'm a bit dorkily terrible at it!

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