This was not a good week for work-life balance. Work won this week. Between the late night meeting with a team in India on Tuesday, flight delays on Wednesday, and work on a project this weekend, my cello has suffered from neglect. The balance thing is really pretty hard. I am looking forward to the day when I can balance retirement activities with cello! Although, if my dad and other retired people I know are any model, I know that even that balance won't be easy.
My lesson this week was good, despite the lack of practice time. My bowing has gotten straighter - after the previous week's video session I was able to straighten out my bow even more, based on this week's video. I'm now working on varying my vibrato speed during long notes, plus working on crescendos and decrescrendos during long notes (it's really hard to do a crescendo while getting towards the tip of the bow!). It was pretty fun during my lesson; my teacher played bits of a Janos Starker recording of Bach's Arioso and had me dissect what Starker was doing from an expressive standpoint and had me play the same passage, trying to emulate Starker's playing. It was fun - doesn't mean that I can't do my own thing - and enlightening to think about the range of things I could do with one phrase. It was really interesting to hear how Starker did something slightly different each time he played the first theme.
Saturday chamber group was fun - our other pianist was there so I got to be on cello the whole time. We played 2 Schumann piano trios, #1 (the d minor, for our pianist who was dying to play it - I'm not sure the rest of us were) and #3. He is such a good pianist - wish I could sight read on the piano as well as he does. We played through the Franck Piano Trio Op 1 #1 in F# minor. I really liked it but sightreading 6 sharps in tenor clef was pretty challenging. It's on our list to play again sometime. We finished with 2 movements of Novak's Piano Trio Op.1 and ran out of time. We liked it enough to want to finish playing through it another time.
Unfortunately I had to cancel out of my Sunday chamber group to work. I hate missing opportunities to play. I did get some practice time in this evening after finishing up work.
1 comment:
Congratulations on making visible progress. That Starker exercise sounds interesting. I have often though about cutting a recording up into chunks so that it is easier to use them to study, but never done it.
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