So can a recorder. Go to Lucie in the Sky with Diamonds, by Amsterdam Sinfonietta.

Thanks to Bas Hoeflaak, the recorder is back in the spotlight for a while. The laugh-out-loud scene has since gone around the world, partly due to the far from virtuoso flute playing of the steel-faced amateur flautist.

Thanks to an at least equally funny twist of fate, on Wednesday afternoon I was at a 'friends' rehearsal' of Amsterdam Sinfonietta, busy with the upcoming tour with principal soloist Lucie Horsch. Who plays the recorder. But well.

Whole tray whistles

Whether Lucie will go into the auditorium at the start of the programme with a steely face saying that she will 'play her flute like this' is not known. It would be a nice addition, but possibly the audience of this tour is not waiting for that. However, she does have not just one flute, but a whole tray full beside her at the start of the programme. For a series of variations on an Irish folk song (Sellengers Round), she switches at lightning speed between very small and very large flutes. All played with equal virtuosity and panache.

The nice thing about attending such a rehearsal is that you can experience how much concentration and effort such a concert takes. So normally, as a relative layman, you don't notice that. Anyone who has ever experienced Amsterdam Sinfonietta live, and I saw them in the past play the stars from the sky with Bryce Dessner of the National and Rufus Wainwright, sees musicians, standing up, often without a music stand in front of them, playing as if it were no effort at all.

Dog-tired rehearsal

Amsterdam Sinfonietta plays without a conductor, but with a leader. Usually that is Candida Thompson, but for this tour it is Canadian-Israeli violinist Daniel Bard. The ensemble of strings, this time also augmented by a theorbo (baroque guitar) and a cimbalom, works in such a rehearsal just as they do on stage without anyone noticeably beating the beat or setting accents. Everything is concentration and listening, and in the informal setting of such a rehearsal, it is fascinating to see how sharp everyone is. It is also dog-tired, as you can see from everyone's face.

The programme Lucie in the Sky with Diamonds and consists of a large number of variations on more and less well-known folk songs from Europe. Present at this rehearsal was the young composer of one of those variations. Freya Waley-Cohen (1989) was there to accompany the rehearsal for the world premiere of her piece. She wrote a variation on the well-known Irish folk tune 'Sellengers Round' and it was fascinating to witness how the collaboration between composer, soloist and orchestra took the music to the next level with each new start.

Queen Elizabeth

It was even more interesting to hear the background to this composition, in which orchestra and soloist regularly seem to derail and sink, only to eventually come back to some sort of breath. Freya Waley-Cohen explained that this folk tune is inextricably linked to the English monarchy, and that she wrote it in response to the death of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, just at a time when the country was politically in chaos and war was looming.

Hear the composition with that story in mind, all the odd measures and gliding notes suddenly speak plain language. Just like Lucie Horsch's sometimes completely diluted recorder playing. Not hilarious like Bas Hoeflaak's, but heaven-sent tragic.