Chamber Music Time!

Ahh..it has been a good music day. I love it when I have time on the weekends for a lot of music. This morning my reading chamber group came over to my house and we were all exhausted at the end of the morning. The one frustrating thing is that every week we go through the email ritual of figuring out who's going to be there. We've gotten better at it - we haven't had a week in a while where we haven't had music for day's configuration of players. But various members will show up at different times,so we change what we're playing as people show up.

This morning our first violinist showed up first. We've had many weeks on the past where it has just been the 2 of us, so I've gotten to the point where I don't even have to look at her while she's playing anymore to know what she's going to do. We played the first movement of Beethoven's "Spring" sonata while waiting..then our other cellist showed up. Because we knew we were going to read through the Arthur Foote piano quartet later, we decided to play his first piano trio. It is a gorgeous piece that we've played before (except for the ending of the last movement is somewhat weird) and it was lovely to play it again. My rhythm practice is paying off as I felt steady throughout, even during parts where the piano part was all over the keyboard. We had time to play part of the first movement of Lalo's first piano trio (another gorgeous piece with lots of lovely cello solos, but alas, I was still on the piano), but we played it rather poorly (took it too fast for our state of consciousness) and fortunately our violist showed up. We only got through part of the 2nd movement of the Foote piano quartet - but oh it is gorgeous - when our 2nd violinist arrived. We will definitely have to play through all of the piano quartet another time.

I finally got to play cello! We switched to string quartets (I doubled with the other cellist), but the first one was weird. I can't even remember who the composer was; it was a modern piece with all of the weird harmonies and timing. We had to give up on the first movement - it was in 5/4 but the cello part had measures with 7 notes for 3 beats and other weird combinations. We couldn't figure out where the first beat of the measure was. The second and third movements were weird too but at least we think we managed to stay together. At least we ended at the same time (one definition of victory)!

The second quartet we played was by a Brazilian composer, Alberto Nepomuceno; we played his first string quartet. It was supposed to have been influenced by Brahms and Mendelssohn but with Brazilian melodies. It was hard to hear the influences. Good thing I had a partner playing the same thing. Then we got tired of very unfamiliar music and ended with the Mendelssohn Op.44 No.2 quartet - I think we may have played it once a while ago - and it was nice to be back in more familiar territory. After that we were exhausted.