Saturday, October 17, 2009

Impossible

I've been listening to a bit of Vivaldi lately and thereby took a notion to dig around and find some classical mandolin playing. The search came to a screeching halt at Evan Marshall's website although I later realized that my idea of classical mandolin was laid-back Baroque melody lines, which this most certainly is not, for the most part. This is a whole new idea, not only is it more strictly classical, (Rossini, and the like) if you read the description on Marshall's homepage, you are told that he plays all the harmonies and whatnot. Good on him, you say. He does it all at exactly the same time. Impressive, you say. Then you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and "click to listen while you surf," and hear him play the, "Ave Maria." Impossible, you say. Yet he does it. Very well.

The site did include a video, or rather a sound clip set to pictures, of a true duet--really two mandolins this time, on nothing less than Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto in C-Major, so there's a bit of the Baroque after all.

Oh, and in the course of writing this post, I found the page on his site that offers a video of him playing "Ave Maria". So now I can see it, but I still can't for the life of me figure out how he does it!

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