Tonight was the debut of a new duet partnership — myself with Scott Fikse, the director of Early Music Hawaii! Oh, we have collaborated in quite a few ways, with me playing the organ and he conducting, as we did as recently as last December when I played the Advent Organ Chorales concert (“Do you still play the organ?”)

And we are both on the Board of Directors of Early Music Hawaii, and have collaborated on quite a few projects at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, the first of which was the Duruflé Requiem concert in memory of Carl Crosier in 2015. Scott bravely conducted the world premiere of Frank Ferko’s Missa O Magne Pater. (Go back and read about this remarkable concert here: SRO Bravissimo!)

Tonight the two of us had to coordinate the processing and uploading of the video to the Early Music Hawaii website. Scott, in the role not only of conductor but video producer as well, started trying to “render” the video from about noon today, with seemingly plenty of time before a 7:00 pm deadline when I would post the video link to the website. Alas, the video rendering failed at 99%, and the process had to be restarted again and again, only to have the message “Video failed.” Finally, the video successfully rendered, but then there were internet connection problems when Scott attempted to upload it to our Vimeo account. When it was obvious the 7:00 pm deadline would not be met, I thought I had better send out email alerts to our mailing list, and the two of us were furiously texting back and forth until the video finally uploaded successfully about 7:30 pm.

A year ago, as you may remember, was my Dueling Bach concert with Jieun Kim Newland, where we played concerto transcriptions for two organs (“Bach tennis match?“) With Jieun having moved to El Paso, TX earlier in the year, I needed to find a new duet partner for the two-organ piece for this concert … and Scott volunteered!

You see, when Scott first moved to Hawaii over five years ago, I volunteered to give him organ lessons — and you can see how the lessons paid off in our performance of Thomas Tomkins, “Fancy for Two to Play” in the Early Music Hawaii video.

To be honest, I was extremely pleased with our performance and the duet was my favorite piece of the whole program! You can download a PDF copy of the program here if you want to see what other repertoire was sung and played. It seems like I was sitting at the harpsichord a whole bunch for this concert!

The video will only be able to be viewed through January 31, 2021.