A New Year is upon us and I wish you all a prosperous, healthy, and productive 2018.

I want to thank Sally Price and Musica Ficta for a wonderful meeting last month. There may not have been many in attendance, but Sally selected/arranged some beautiful music for us to play and I do not think that we have ever sounded better as a group. The Prelude featured several pieces especially arranged for us by Sally and played with style and finese. She and the group put a lot of time and effort into preparing for us and it showed through in beauty.

This month we have Adam Bregman, who is new to us, but well known in Early Music World both here in the United States and Europe leading us. Adam, who specializes in sackbut, is currently studying at the USC Thornton School of MusicEarly Music Program after recently studying in Belgium and he plays with Piffaro—the Renaissance Band, Ciaramella Ensemble for the Music of the 15th Century. Please plan to attend and welcome him to OCRS.

As Sally Price mentioned again last month she has put together for us a session on learning and improving to play alto up. She passed around a sign-up sheet and 3 people indicated that they were interested. We need more than that to make this happen, so if you are interested in expanding your playing/reading ability, please let me know at winaldrich@earthlink.net. It would be ideal if we could get something like 8-10 people so that we can go ahead and make plans and arrangements. This would be supported by OCRS and would be a several hours long mini-workshop with at most a modest donation expected.

Registration sign-ups for the OCRS Recorder Workshop on February 17th have started coming in. We are looking forward to a good turnout again this year, but do not wait to sign-up until the last minute.

See you the 12th,

—Win Aldrich