Good Vibrations

I had my lesson yesterday rather than last week, since I had to be in the Bay Area for most of the week. I came home late Saturday night and am still exhausted from last week - leaving at 5:30am and returning at 10pm after work-related evening events wednesday, thursday, and friday nights. It was pretty tiring and I'm still not quite recovered.

But back to my lesson report. I thought I wouldn't play very well given the nearly non-existent amount of practicing I had done over the week on the rental cello I have in the Bay Area, but I had a good lesson anyway. We worked on getting the strings to start vibrating quickly and with a lot of vibration when I cross strings at different volume levels - this week I'm practicing stopping, getting my bow in the correct position on the next string, then working on grabbing the string, moving it, and getting the vibration going fast (without funny extra sounds like scratching). We did this with my part on the Popper Requiem, and I could hear the difference in sound. Now one of these days the goal is to be able to do this without stopping in between notes! At least I'm working on getting muscle memory in the right places.

For the past few weeks I've also been working on some intonation exercises that my teacher gave me, there are a lot different ones and I've made up some of my own, but the basic goal is to teach me how to get to the same note with different fingers from different places - like from my hand not even on the cello, on a different string, or shifting from one finger to another. It seems like it should be much easier than it is to hit say, the G on the D string that you would play with your 4th finger if you are in 1st position, with any finger (1, 2, 3, or 4) when starting from off the cello or from the harmonic on another string or just shifting. The exercises are quite tedious but it is awfully irritating when I don't hit the note correctly!

Our Sunday group was 3 of us - the rest of the group was playing a concert with their other orchestra (I'm one of the few in the group who plays with just 1 orchestra!). We started with 3 cellos and had a lot of fun playing music for many cellos. This time we rotated who played cello 1, complete with a lot of jokes about "oh, but I have to play the first part!" I was really happy that I was able to actually sightread and play one of the Klengel pieces we played - the cello 1 part was completely in tenor and treble clef! After that we switched to piano trios - our host is very versatile; he plays violin, viola, and cello, so he got out his violin, and I got on the piano. To honor Beethoven's birthday we played the Archduke Trio and part of the Trio #8 op121 (set of variations). We were going to read through the "Ghost" trio until I discovered that I had printed the violin part twice and we were missing the cello part. Oops.