There was a faculty artist recital last Tuesday in Krieg Recital Hall, featuring professors David Leapley on the trumpet, Andrew Jones on the tuba and Colvin Bear on the French horn.
Leapley has been the trumpet teacher at Wittenberg for eight years, and will be replacing Brandon Jones as the band and orchestra teacher next semester. He opened the recital with a bright and lively trumpet piece, with the always lovely Diane Slagle on piano accompaniment.
Leapley was followed by A. Jones, who has been teaching tuba at Wittenberg for three years. It may be hard to imagine a tuba solo, but Jones did a truly impressive job, with strong vibrato and a cadenza. For those of you who don’t know what a cadenza is, it’s a sort of free moment in a piece where only the main instrument plays a lot of fast and flowing notes, which is hard to do on a large instrument like the tuba.
Colvin Bear followed A. Jones with a hand horn, which is like a French horn but with no valves, or keys, which meant that there were certain pitches that were more difficult to play. Bear had to stick his hand into the horn to get some notes to play, which meant that half of the notes sounded normal and half sounded light and tinny. It made for an interesting performance overall. Bear has been playing the French horn at Wittenberg for a whopping 35 years, and currently lives in a geo-dome house that he designed himself. He’s got quite the story, and he’s a fantastic horn player.
Leapley performed a second piece with sophomore Teddy Jones (there are a lot of musicians with the last name Jones in this University), who is an amazing trumpet player and music major.
“I told Teddy if he outplays me in this, I’m gonna fail him for the semester,” Leapley said jokingly before they performed as a testament to T. Jones’ skill.
Just listening to the two of them play, you wouldn’t be able to tell who was the student and who was the teacher.
The performance ended with the three teachers playing a trio together with the trumpet, French horn and euphonium, which is essentially a smaller tuba.
Being three professional players, they all performed very well both separately and together, and it was a pleasure to listen to them.
Wittenberg frequently holds open music events like these, which are both for the enjoyment of students and members of the Springfield community and for the music students, who are required to attend a certain amount of music performances each semester.
The next performance will be the General Student Recital on April 4 at 3:30 p.m. in Krieg Hall.
