April Odds and Ends

Since this is April, it must be dogwood season. Or at least it usually is. And dogwood season means the Dogwood Arts Festival! The DAF is the first big spring fling that Knoxville can truly call its own. A bodaceous assortment of arts, crafts and disciplines are brought together for most of April. The brochure is just a beginning for finding interesting performances; the best way to enjoy the DAF is just to venture downtown and take in the Market Square scene, which is what I did for a spell today. Boy, if I wasn’t so diabetic I would have been all over an Orange Julius, but that’s beside the point. Right there on the Market Square stage was trombonist Tom Lundberg (below) leading the Knoxville Jazz Youth Orchestra! On Gay St., a tuba quartet was tackling Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, and later on Kathy Hart-Reilly’s Suzuki Hart-Strings were slated to appear.
Some of you old-timers will remember Lee Richey, an outstanding cellist who was hired at the same audition I was in 1986. He was a fan favorite and became principal cellist in 1990(?). He moved on in the 90's, but now he is in Las Vegas, playing shows AND, according to this month’s union paper, conducting! He is pictured on page 8 in front of a benefit concert orchestra. Those were the days....
While many people travel to Florida in the spring, not many who do so have tying the knot in mind. That is exactly what flutist Jill Allard and Mac Bartine did, though, on April 7th, in Melbourne Beach, FL. Congratulations are in order!!! We kidded her that she must have practiced her opera part (for Otello) an awful lot down there, because she sounded great in rehearsal today!