It's that time of the semester when everything seems to be happening at once. Coming up tomorrow evening is the Baroque Orchestra concert with Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Rebel's Les Elémens. Stanley Ritchie, my teacher, is the soloist, and he sounds amazing. His interpretation is also unique - he claims he has never listened to a recording of the piece, so that explains his fresh approach. On Monday it's straight back into rehearsals for the next orchestra concert - only ten days away - in which a number of students get to perform a concerto or solo piece with the orchestra. Coming up on the 6th of March, I'm also playing in a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet with friends. Anyone who's ever played that piece will know that it's extremely challenging in many ways - for ensemble, intonation and musical feeling, not to mention the awkwardness of individual parts. And then, starting this Friday evening, and hopefully lasting no more than two evenings, I'm recording Bach's G minor solo sonata as part of applications for the Leipzig Bach competition and the American Bach Soloists Academy, both happening in July this year. So this is going to be a crazy week, in which I will not have nearly enough time to practise. Somehow I'll have to get through it without going insane.
In the last few weeks I was involved in the Monteverdi Vespers, which went really well. We played both here and in Indianapolis. Indy was particularly memorable because after the concert I went with some friends to an awesome chocolate cafe where I had a Mexican hot chocolate and a couple of chocolate truffles. I also played in a concert organised and directed by a fellow violinist friend of mine, in which I played second violin in Bach's Concerto for three violins, BWV 1064. My friend also played a Vivaldi concerto amazingly, and a soprano friend performed a Vivaldi motet stunningly. It was all in all an excellent concert and musical experience - the audio and video turned out pretty well too, so I may be able to post some of that next time once I get a copy. My part for the Bach concerto had a ridiculously florid and virtuosic solo in the last movement - I got to play twenty four bars of non-stop semiquavers, reminiscent of the solo in Brandenburg concerto No. 4. I was so hyped up during the performance, that afterwards I couldn't remember playing a single note of it.
I haven't even mentioned classes yet - a few days ago I did an hour long group presentation on string bowings for Classical performance practice class, and the Bach Cantata class that I'm doing involves weekly assignments and time practising parts for the Thursday class performances. It feels great to be so busy, but at the same time I'm craving a break! Only a couple of weeks until Spring Break, and then another couple of weeks until I fly to Oregon! Sweeet!!
Back to the strange events of today. This morning we had a dress rehearsal for the Baroque Orchestra concert. It lasted three hours and was quite draining; things were still going wrong in terms of ensemble and intonation and there was some frustration being felt all round. After that, Marie and I went to get some lunch, and we were driving in her car and pulled up to a red light. As we were sitting there waiting for the light to go green there was an almighty bang and we were shunted forward in our seats. We had been rear-ended. We composed ourselves and got out of the car, to find that there was absolutely no damage to either car. The person behind said she'd spilled her coke all over herself, and hadn't stopped in time. So we carried on and had lunch at a burrito place and chilled out. After that it was back to school to practise, as we had scheduled a time to run through our Bach sonatas for each other - Marie's also going for the Leipzig competition. So I was practising in my room, with half an hour to go before the run-through, and SNAP!!! My A-string broke. Memories of my dreadful audition at Oberlin came flooding back - the exact same thing happened half an hour before my audition, and I ended up playing more out of tune than I've ever done in my life, because the string kept going flat. So, the same thing happened during the Bach run through. Each movement got more and more out of tune - poor Marie had to sit and endure it.
So that was a bizarre day, and I'm now back at home listening to Chopin and playing Scrabble on Facebook. Weird.
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