Style and success

Yesterday I have recorded 5 videos but shared only one - an improvisation on Ubi Caritas:

Aušra went to visit her parents in their garden and I stayed at home and practiced. At first, I recorded this improvisation as a warmup. The hardest thing for me was ge registration while playing. I didn’t have my iPad connected to the laptop so couldn’t press Hauptwerk buttons by touch. Instead, I had to use laptop’s trackpad which was a bit awkward. I hope I will hear from Duet Display app support which will help solve app’s crashing on start. Even though changing stops was challenging, I enjoyed improvising on this chant as it was appropriate for Maunday Thursday.

Then I practiced and recorded the last movement fro Krebs’ Sonatina Seconda and all three movements of Sonatina Terza. Recording the last movement was difficult because my iPad’s screen went dark right towards the end of the piece and because I aimed for nonstop recording, I had to start from the top. When Aušra came home I had 5 videos done which felt quite an accomplishment.

After lunch we practiced opening Sinfonia from Bach’s Easter Oratorio as organ duet. Strangely enough even the first run went quite nice so I decided to press Record on the second try. The most challenging thing for me probably was to coordinate my foot movements when I had to turn pages using iRig Bluetooth device for forScore app. Aušra and I feel we can record this movement properly in time for Easter which is very exciting.

In the evening we decided to watch a livestream recital of young Dutch organist on YouTube, Gert van Hoef. The first piece was Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue and during it we saw that this organist is not for us. With all due respect for his fame as youtuber he doesn’t have a clue about historically informed performance practice. His 75.5k subscribers probably are not bothered by this. To be fair, he engaged with his audience very well at the beginning both in Dutch and in English, something we all should strive to do. Last time I checked this morning, this livestream already had 8k views. So anyway, we ended up watching our friend's Auke Jongbloed and James Flores videos instead to finish our day.

If only success on YouTube depended on your expertise and authority level...