The Post Happy Fourth of July Rehearsal

Okay, I think this should now finally work!!  This is the nine minutes I mentioned last week that's from a rehearsal on July 3 of the Fourth of July concert by Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago at Millennium Park, made up of largely members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra.  I posted shorter videos from the rehearsal, but try as I might, I couldn't manage this much-longer (and wonderful) piece.

How problematic was the effort? It took almost three hours of trying to upload video with the monumentally-slow Internet connection I had at my hotel, but I eventually gave up trying to post this Fourth of July material because it not only wouldn't complete until...oh, July Fifth, but it wouldn't even complete then.  (I began working on downloading the material before midnight on July and kept at it until 2:30 in the morning.  And then gave up.  Because that doesn't even include the time it then takes to encode.)

After posting the much shorter videos in the interim from the same event, I eventually took another tack and brought my laptop to a different location where the Internet connection was actually normal.  But I couldn't connect...

But back home, with my normal Internet...it's done!!  And took about five minutes.  O huzzah.

Well, not five minutes exactly.  It took five minutes to convert it to the proper format for this website and upload it.  The problem is that it was longer than the limit of videos for the site.  And so I had to dive back in and edit into two sections.

This comes from that Fourth of July rehearsal with the Grant Park Orchestra  By way of reminder, I was wandering through Millennium Park in downtown Chicago on July 3rd when I heard music playing in the bandshell.  I headed over, and to my surprise it was the Grant Park Orchestra rehearsing for the next day.  (They put on a couple of free concerts a week during the summer.) 

The video starts into the piece, by a few minutes I suspect. There's a bit of stopping by the orchestra, fixing things and starting up again -- hey, it's a rehearsal, after all.  But thanks to the magic of the Pause button, I think I kept things to a minimum.  If the image jumps a bit, that's why.  But I also was able to keep it to a minimum because I split the long video at one of those breaks in the rehearsal.

The wonderful piece is "American Flute Salute," arranged by David Mairs.  And the flute soloist here is Mary Stopler, principal flutist of the orchestra, and principal substitute for the Chicago Symphony.

And it's all terrific.  Hopefully it's worth the effort...

And the best thing of all is that no tanks and flyovers were involved.

Today's tip:  in the lower right-hand corner, you'll see a diagonal arrow when the video begins playing.  Clicking on that will make the picture full screen and much more enjoyable to watch.

​And now...Part Two --