Trumpet Invasion

The concert series continued tonight with a show titled Trumpet Invasion. One just never can tell from the title alone, and the printed descriptions sometimes can give one pause, too: piano and trumpet duo? a father/son team with "a comedic presence only father and son can share on a stage"? Hm. Visions of Hee Haw or the Chmielewski Funtime Variety Show Band momentarily danced about in my head (readers who were kids in ND when I was may recall those two TV staples). So I checked them out on the Internet in advance, and guess what? They sounded good!

And having just returned from the actual concert, I can confirm that they are, in fact, terrific! The dad, Rich Ridenour, plays piano, and his son, Brandon, plays the trumpet, the flugelhorn, and the piccolo trumpet. They're both alumni of Juilliard, and Brandon is a current member of the Canadian Brass, so they're both pretty hot stuff musically speaking. Brandon is a great brass player with super breath support, nimble lips, and fast-moving fingers and a tongue that can make the notes fly out accurately and musically at an astonishing pace. His dad is an accomplished pianist who makes it look effortless to play concert-difficulty arrangements with a ready smile on his face and a keen eye on his son, ever mindful that his job as accompanist is to accompany the soloist, not just to charge ahead regardless of the trumpeter's tempo.

Not only did the two of them play well together, but they also played off one another well. Rich was the emcee, introducing songs and keeping things lighthearted with jokes and "bits" with his son and direct references to audience members (e.g., chastising people returning to their seats late after intermission). Brandon played the straight man, a man of few words whose few words mattered all the more whenever he chose to say them. Brandon played piano, too, on a couple songs, joining his dad on the bench and impressing with his own ivory-tickling skills . . . but one time, his dad started moving up the keyboard and used his hip to push Brandon off the bench in order to take over the high keys of the piano himself! A few times at the end of a song, after rising and bowing in thanks for our applause, Rich would gesture toward the piano as one might toward a fellow musician on stage as though to say, "Me? What about him? He was terrific, too."

Faithful Reader, if you know my uncle Ray, you can picture Rich Ridenour, who has the same animated face and twinky-eyed grin. Even when not using his face to emphasize jokes or evoke laughter from the audience, Rich couldn't keep his face from displaying emotion: a full-faced smile would take over many times during a song as he would look across the piano at his son playing so expertly and impressively on the trumpet. Picture Ray (those of you who know him) looking at one of his grandchildren tottering across the room toward him, and you'll know the facial expression that I mean.

The music was great (click Brandon's name above to listen), but the entire experience was enhanced by their humor and their willingness to interact with the audience. One of Rich's jokes: "What do you get when you cross a tiger with a bicycle? Gershwin." (Grr = tiger, Schwinn = bike) Another: "What do polar bears get from sitting around all day on ice caps? Polaroids." (polar + hemorrhoids) When Rich then wondered aloud why we don't call hemorrhoids "asteroids," Brandon cut him off and moved on to the next song!

Later on, before one song toward the end of the concert, Brandon looked at me in the second row with a sleeping Hillary in my lap and said, "You might want to wake her up before this one starts." I tried, but Hillary was fast asleep, so Brandon said, "Okay, then I will!" ["wake her up," that is]. The crowd laughed . . . and laughed all the more when Hillary still didn't wake up, even after the very loud blaring of the opening notes on the trumpet. (After a few moments, Hillary did wake up and, feeling that she was the butt of some joke that the entire audience was in on, started to cry. After the show Brandon apologized to Hillary while providing his autograph on her program.) (And, while signing Suzanna and Abigail's programs, Brandon asked what has, by now, become to us a familiar question about them: "Are you two twins?")

Before crawling into my lap and falling alseep, Hillary was seated on the other side of Susan, so I couldn't see how she was responding to the concert. But Abigail was right beside me and Suzanna beside her, so I could easily glance over and see their eyes wide open and their mouths pulled back into impressed smiles during each song. When they "got" Rich's jokes or understood the difficulty of something that either Rich or Brandon was doing, they would look at me with even wider eyes, jump up and down a little in their seats, and then quickly return their gaze to the stage. It's awesome to see our kids' not only enjoying good music but also appreciating the quality of a performance (technique, difficulty, musicianship, etc.). These season tickets are an excellent investment.