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Season’s greetings to everyone who has helped us this year.

This year, we recorded Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus, K. 618” as an original greeting card. Although only 46 measures long, this late Mozart masterpiece is filled with sanctity and musical profundity. It was written for a 4-part soprano, alto, tenor, and bass chorus, strings consisting of violin, viola, and cello, and organ. Here, however, we performed it with flute1 and keyboard2. For a while after we began, I regretted taking it on, realizing once again that not a single note can be added to or subtracted from Mozart. But after repeating it several times, we arrived at this performance.

Please enjoy it. And have a wonderful end of the year!

 

Junko Sakimura & Nat Sakimura

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Footnotes

  1. An Altus A1407RE was used. Altus is a manufacturer founded by President Tanaka 26 years ago. Mr. Tanaka founded Altus after working at Muramatsu and Miyazawa. He has gone on to make flutes with a character distinct from Muramatsu’s. I imagine his ideal may be to combine the tone of old French flutes such as those by Louis Lot with a well-balanced scale. Among the well-known flutists who use them are perhaps William Bennett, Denis Bouriakov (principal at the New York Metropolitan Opera), and Emily Beynon (principal at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). He is particular even about the composition of the silver, using silver with a purity of .997 and making open G# models as well. I had actually gone to buy such an instrument with the necessary budget in hand, but this A1407RE selected by Bouriakov was so well balanced that, although it is a closed-G model made of .925 sterling silver, I ended up buying it. Well, it was half the price, too (^^;). Incidentally, the Gold Model was also very good, but it cost nearly 3 times my budget, so it was rather beyond my reach (sweat).

    The A1407RE is a soldered-tone-hole model and has a very soft sound.

    I also own an AFL-1207RB, a drawn-tone-hole model with a B foot. It is an old instrument (its serial number is in the 1000 range), so it may have been handmade by President Tanaka. This one has a more powerful sound, but Ave verum corpus is a piece for which Mozart’s only instruction is “Sotto voce” at the beginning, so I used the softer-sounding A1407RE.

  2. Casio CTK-671

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