Sight Reading day

During our chamber group today, we had an unusual configuration of players. We had 1 violinist, 1 violinist or pianist, 1 cellist, and me (cello or piano). So I volunteered to play the viola part on my cello, so that we could play piano quartets or string quartets. I suppose we could have doubled parts and played piano trios, but I like having my own part for chamber music.

Everyone was gracious enough to play easier pieces than we normally play, at slower speeds than normal. We played through Mendelssohn's first piano quartet (op.1 - wonder how old he was when he wrote it..but it already sounds like Mendelssohn), and 2 early Schubert string quartets, D87 and D74. I still had trouble sight reading the viola clef, managing to play maybe 50% of the notes correctly (repetition was a good thing; gave me time to figure out the notes!). I would get settled in and be able to read (sort of), and then something would flip in my mind and I would start thinking in another clef, tenor or treble and totally screw up. I tried to fake it by matching the harmonies or at least playing something on the downbeat or tried to sing my part. It was a workout! Tomorrow I will be able to play a cello part, and be a cello (thank goodness!)

My lesson yesterday was good; I showed my teacher the exercise I made up to try to learn how to change bow speeds when I change bow direction while keeping the tone consistent. He really liked it and I'm sure he'll use it or something similar with his other students. Inconsistency of tone and poor bow control when switching directions is something that he's pointed out in my playing, so I've been playing scales and making up exercises to try to produce a nice sounding tone and consistent volume when I vary the speed and pressure of the bow. Next up is really learning how to control the volume and tone so I can really do a good job of crescendos and decrescendos.

He's started me working on the Lee op31 exercises, and had me work on a relaxed legato bow and making eighth notes really even. It felt like moments of panic interspersed with calm. It amazes me that producing an even sound requires such uneven effort. Then I played the 3rd piece from the Hindemith Drei Liechte Stucke. I really like them. He has programmed the piano part into his computer, so I've had the challenge of playing well with the accompaniment. On these pieces it is not easy because the rhythms are offset and it's easy to screw up.

Great fun at the gig!

It was a lot of fun on Sunday, playing for our friends in our fearless leader's lab. The acoustics were wonderful; everyone sounded great, and we had a lot of fun.

we played the Mendelssohn octet - the best we've every played it. The funny thing about performances was that I had trouble where I've never messed up before, and I nailed some of the really hard passages. That was true of everyone else too. There were parts that sounded really amazing.

The program was
Handel - Entrance to the Queen of Sheba
Mendelssohn - Octet
Vivaldi - flute concerto
a Telemann violin duet
Rabinowitz - 4 pieces for string quartet
Vanhall - flute + string quartet
Vivaldi - Summer/Winter

I played the keyboard to accompany our fearless leader playing the violin for the last Vivaldi piece. He sounded really great. I couldn't figure out why I would lose him, but yesterday he told me that he had dropped beats here and there and messed with the tempo and wasn't sure how I managed to stay with him. It helped that I could read his part while I was playing. I had fun playing and improvising around what he was playing, but for a while I couldn't figure out why I wasn't staying with him. We did start and end together (that's always a victory!) and I certainly had fun playing (liked the challenge of figuring out what to improvise).

Exhausted

It has been a really busy week, and not good for cello playing.

Our group is getting ready to perform on May 17th, and we had dress rehearsal scheduled for Friday night. One of the pieces we're performing is the Mendelssohn Octet. Given everyone's schedules, we've rarely had all 8 of us together at the same time. We've practiced with parts of the group, but every person plays am important part.

I was really tired after traveling this week. I left Sunday and came home on Friday. It was for work, and was pretty stressful, with long hours every day. My playing last night suffered from lack of practice and exhaustion. At least I have a week to practice the parts that have been giving me trouble all along.

I was also bummed yesterday to find out that I have to start commuting to headquarters again. It's been so nice this year to be home for longer periods of time. The silver lining to budget cuts was that my work travel had been severely curtailed. Yesterday I found out that I have to start commuting again; we negotiated every other week, 3 or 4 days a week. Previously I was commuting every week, 2 to 3 days a week. Now I know I shouldn't be whining so much about this; I love my job and am thankful that I have one. But still, traveling for work is not at all like traveling for fun, and the frequency was exhausting. Plus it impacts cello practice time.

When I was commuting regularly I had rented a cello ( I am fortunate to be able to stay with my brother when I'm in the Bay Area). One of the reasons why I accelerated getting my new cello was so that I could have a decent cello in the Bay Area. Then I stopped traveling as much and the urgency to have 2 cellos disappeared. But I still only have one cello. My other cello is in Pocatello with Chris..he is doing some work on it. The plan is take my new one to him in September for a check up and another coat of varnish. He will return my former cello to me then, so I have a cello while he works on the new one. Now I'll have to decide whether to rent a cello in the Bay Area again or just not practice while I'm there.

Exhaling

For the past few weeks during my swim workout I have been concentrating on exhaling completely. It sounds rather silly to think about breathing, but it is amazing how much it has helped me feel strong during some hard swims. Yesterday one of our sets was 6 100 IM's. In the past I would have cheated on the butterfly, maybe swimming half of the length fly and finish with freestyle, but with my new mantra of breathing out (if I exhale loudly when my face is in the water no one can hear it!) I was able to do all 6 IM's with the 25 fly and even felt reasonably good going into the backstroke. wow.

So that got me thinking about what simple-sounding thing I could do during cello practice. How could I change a practice approach? The 'aha!' moment I had was thinking about feeling the bow against the string. I've been worrying about the flexibility of my bow hand, drawing the bow straight, and a whole host of other things. During the past couple of days I've been concentrating on feeling the bow - feeling my bow catch and move the string when I change bow direction, feeling and controlling string pressure against the bow during long slow bows, feeling the string when I change bow speed. The other issues are probably still there, but I've already noticed that my tone is much steadier and consistent. another wow! why didn't I think of that before?


Today we had piano trios and I got to be on the cello instead of the piano. Yay! We played the Mendelssohn D minor trio, the Schubert Eb major trio (love the cello solo in the slow movement!), Beethoven Piano Trio #5 (the 'Ghost'), and Fanny Mendelssohn's Piano trio. I am really happy with my cello. It is beginning to open up in sound. It was really fun to crank it up! after we were all done, I even got to try to play the Arpeggione sonata. There are sections that I can play now that I've never been able to play, and it is so nice to have a cello that can handle the high notes...really easy to play over the piano. it was so much fun today!

the cello is not a violin

but I had fun today anyway...we started practice in my Sunday group and had 4 people - violin, viola, and 2 cellos, and a quartet that we're planning to play at our next gig. I volunteered to try playing the violin II part since my teacher has wanted me to practice playing up high on the cello. It was a blast pretending to be a violin! My cello sounds wonderful - clear and full even really really high up (got up to the f 2 octaves above middle c - high for violins too!) and it blended well with the others.

then I got back to being a cello - we're rehearsing the Mendelssohn Octet - really fun to play and very challenging - we have just over a month left to get it ready for our next gig...

Busy!

It's been a busy week - got in some extra practice time because I actually had Martin Luther King Jr. day off as a holiday. Trying to fit in everything I want to practice is tough.

We had our first orchestra practice for the new year! The program is very nice - Holst 2nd Suite; Butterworth "A Shropshire Lad", and Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. I was really confused about which part I was playing - the cellos go divisi a lot and sometimes it was by stand and sometimes it was inside/outside...so a lot of the time I wasn't sure if I was playing the correct part.

This Wednesday I'm playing a gig at work with a flautist. We were supposed to play at the office holiday party, but the party got postponed because of all of the snow Seattle got around Christmas. We had to find some new music to play because Christmas carols in January didn't really seem like a good idea. So Friday we played some music together for the first time, to pick what we'll play on Wednesday. We're going to play some dances from Febonio op29 "Rustic Airs and Dances" (I've never heard of Febonio before!), and a Beethoven duet that was originally written for clarinet and bassoon. fortunately, today I was able to run through everything with the violinist in my chamber group...not much time to get it ready for Wednesday.

Today's chamber group was a duet for a while, then a string trio. The string trio we read was a keeper! It was 3 string trios by Hyacinthe Jadin (a male, not a female). We were pretty excited about every movement in every trio!

and last but not least...my lessons continue and we just started playing a Kummer duet op156, duo #4 - we played through all of the movements at my lesson on Friday and hopefully soon will be able to play it at speed. I have my list of things that I'm working on..
--loosening my wrist while bowing, right now really working on dotted rhythms and a quick snap of the wrist and getting the short note to articulate
--detached bowing (on the string and off the string)
--arpeggios: this week need to work on nailing the shift down from the root to the fifth of the chord when descending)
--shifting exercise from Sevecik op8
--trill exercise (based on Cossman)
--vibrato
--scales: work on controlling bow pressure so that sound volume stays consistent (my teacher pointed out the it looked like I was easing up at the tip and at the frog...and hence producing inconsistent volume/tone)

oh..and don't forget to have fun playing...!

chamber music!

my saturday group finally met, after more than a month off. The holidays, the weather, travel, all conspired against us. We had 5 of us today! We started with violin/cello - a Telemann piece, very nice. When our violist showed up we started a Mozart Divertmento. Then our other cellist showed up and she and I doubled on the Mozart. When our 2nd violinist showed up we switched to string quintets. I got another shot at the Schubert...one of my all-time favorite pieces...it's so much fun to play. We finished with a Taneev string quintet (2 violins, viola, 2 cellos...there is Taneev string quintet with 2 violas...but we never seem to have 2 violas) That one was deemed worthy of another time reading though it.

very fun and sure nice to play with everyone again!

and really good news ... I got pictures of my new cello ... hope I will get it in a month or so....

Fun at the Last Gig

We celebrated the new year with a gig at our other cellist's house. It was fun - people listening, drinking, eating, and having a good time. We had a good time playing. You can see me in the back but it's hard to see our other cellist.





We played a number of celtic tunes, our leader the fearless violinist/violist/cellist switched to cello so that we could play a Beethoven piece (op87) arranged for 3 cellos. I was really happy with the way I played - since I was playing first cello for it I spent the entire time (4 movements) in tenor...and even managed to figure out how to play the thumb position parts that were written in tenor. We had been practicing for a while...and this was the best we'd ever played the whole piece (good timing!) We played a Vivaldi violin and cello concerto but I got to take it easy with the cello part while our other cellist (we were at her house) did the solo. The big piece we did was 3 movements from the Schubert quintet - wow! We had our moments good and not so good, but it was so much fun to play it since it is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

After the gig was over we drove home in a snowstorm! It was the last bit of snow for us, now that it's warmed up. Poor Washington state, first hit by an unusual amount of snow and now it's warmed up, raining and it's flooding everywhere.

Gig Report, and it's been a while since I posted!

We had a great time at our gig last night!

We've been rotating around to people's houses - last night was at our house. I have a music room and we squeezed into it, but everyone liked it because you could hear us throughout the house, but people were free to move around, eat, and talk while we were playing. That was the way chamber music was played - at people's homes, not a formal concert setting, and not as the main activity of the evening. A friend of mine brought 2 of her kids and 2 of their friends, and the kids had a good time running around or standing outside the room listening to us. One of the little girls plays the violin, and I think it's cool for them to see adults playing music for fun (not forced to perform at a recital!)

We played 2 different tangos (those were very fun to play); our other cellist and I did the Vivaldi double cello concerto (we were really happy with the way we played together!); Vivaldi's Autumn; a movement from a Schubert quartet (only 4 of the group played - I sat out so I could do some hostessing type duties); Handel's Entrance to the Queen of Sheba, and we closed with one of our violinists playing Bach Violin Concerto in A minor. I played the piano for "Autumn" and the Bach - I spent a reasonable amount of time practicing the Bach (normally I don't have much time these days to practice the piano, but needed to do some work to get it ready...)...we had fun and the next gig will be close to the holidays.

My Saturday chamber group met this morning, and I was tired but ready when everyone showed up. We had a quintet, 2 violins, viola, and 2 cellos, so we played 2 quintets I found in the public domain sites - a Carl Goldmark quintet and another by Ethyl Smyth. They were both very nice, especially the Goldmark quintet. Last week we had a piano quartet, so we played the Schumann Piano Quartet and the 3rd Brahms Piano Quartet (c minor - has a gorgeous cello solo in the slow movement).

I had my lesson today instead of last night because of the gig, and now I'm working on placing my fingers down accurately - no wiggling or edging into the right pitch - I'm especially inaccurate when I shift down. I showed my teacher some of the exercises I made up and he gave me some pointers and wants me to work on some of the exercises in Sevcik op 8. I'm modifying the exercise to stop and check that I've actually placed my fingers in the right place (when you put down all of your fingers you can't tell whether all of your fingers in the right place unless you remove some of the fingers and check, which is what I've been doing). Who would have thought that half steps and whole steps would be so hard?

A few weeks ago for fun I tried playing the violin! Our versatile member of my Sunday group who plays violin, viola, and cello, handed me a viola and a violin after one of our practices and showed me how to play them. The viola was pretty big; and on both instruments my bow was wandering all over the place. So one day we had 2 cellos, 1 violin, and 1 viola and we wanted to go through the Schubert we played for the gig. So I volunteered to play violin II. It was pretty funny, I even played it twice through. The quartet was Schubert's first; he wrote it when he was 16. It really was a violin I solo with accompaniment from the other parts, which worked out well for me trying to play the violin part. The note/patterns were repetitive and didn't change to often, which gave me time to think ahead of time about which string and where my fingers were supposed to go (and fortunately I didn't have to get out of 1st position either). Of course when I shifted back to the cello I couldn't play it for a few minutes while my brain was trying to shift back to where my fingers were supposed to go. I've never had problems bouncing around between the piano and the cello and it must be because the instruments are so different, or that I've played the piano for so long ...

My Staycation

I took this week off from work, and am being trendy by spending it as a 'staycation'

This week's activities:
--Seal the kitchen counters
--Polish all of the wood furniture and cabinets (days later, still have a few rooms to go...ugh, at least I am clearing off junk and cleaning up as I go)
--Buy solar-powered walkway lights (still have to install)
--General house cleaning...trying to get rid of the clutter...
--Organize all of the stray music (bought file storage bins today)

Practicing is in there, too, not as much as I would like! There are more things on my list, but I think that I'm going to be stretched to finish what I've started.

It's amazing how busy I've been and how little I feel that I've accomplished (but the cabinets sure look good!). I could happily retire and keep extremely busy.

On the practice front: still working on landing my fingers in the right spot, and this week my teacher asked me to make sure that I'm doing that AND keeping my bow hand loose...sigh, something goes when I work on one thing. My Sunday group is getting ready for our next gig, so I need to practice my part of the Vivaldi Double Cello concerto (yea!) and the piano part of the Bach A minor Violin Concerto. I don't need to work as hard for the other pieces. And, need to spend time on chamber orchestra stuff. If only my hands weren't so tired...

Chamber group on Saturday was fun; we played piano quartets. I found the score and parts of the Faure Piano Quartet No 1 (C minor) online, and printed it for us to play. The string parts weren't too bad, but our pianist said that the piano part was really hard and would take a long time to prepare The slow movement was absolutely gorgeous. We finished with the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet, always a favorite!

random notes - chamber groups...

Just so it's clear that not all of my time has been spent practicing tedious exercises, my groups have been going strong and we've had some excellent sessions.

Last week...we had a sextet! We played the Brahms sextets. I am more familiar with no. 1, the B flat Major sextet. I was glad I was playing second cello on that one - the other cellist sounded incredibly awesome during her solo parts - we had to repeat it so that we could listen to her play it again! It was a level of playing I am aspiring to! we traded and I played Cello 1 on the G maj sextet, but quickly was wishing that I was on Cello 2. One of our violists came a little late, so we had started with a string quintet by Carl Goldmark, 2 violins, 1 viola, 2 cellos, and got through the first movement and defintely want to play the first movement again and explore the rest of it.

Today - we had a piano quintet! Yeah! We played the Schumann and the Brahms piano quintets. It was so much fun. I'm glad I had spent time working on the piano parts, it made playing the cello so much easier today because I had some sense for what was going on in the rest of the parts after staring at the score when playing the piano. Not that the cello parts were easy - the rhythms in the Schumann are tough and the Brahms has some hairy parts for everyone too. They are amazing compositions...

Chamber orchestra rehearsals have been good...I've broken out my metronome to practice my parts. Playing at speed and in an early classical style has been challenging, especially when we are doing the fast movements. And then, sounding good during the slow movements...also challenging. With only 3 cellists (still waiting to get cello #4) we all need to sound good. Instead of playing a concert we are going to record the pieces and produce a CD. It will be fun to get into a studio to play!

practice and other notes

My teacher recorded me playing Bach Arioso at my lesson on Friday. He had me play it with a recorded accompaniment track, thinking that I'd relax more if I was playing with something else. He was right; it was fun playing with the 'piano' because it helped me keep the beat steady. I was pretty happy with how much I've improved since the last time he recorded me playing it, about 1 year ago. For the first time I asked for the file - I'll probably post it in the cellobloggers space.

For the past few weeks he's had me work on loosening my right wrist and to practice making my fingers very flexible. It's starting to pay off, but I noticed that my stress response is still to tighten up on vibrato (at least for the very first time on the Arioso I actually kept playing vibrato throughout the note even when stressed out!) and to tighten up my wrist. At my previous and at this lesson he's had me starting to work on keeping my fingers flexible while crossing strings. Never a dull moment!

Today for our chamber group we were back to a piano trio. Since it's been quite a few weeks since we had this configuration, it didn't feel too bad. I was glad to be on piano because my right thumb is a little torn up and sore (thank goodness for bandaids!) so playing the piano was pretty nice to give it a rest. We made a cool discovery, playing Saint-Saens Piano Trio No. 1 in F major. What a lovely piece. Then we attempted to play the Beethoven Piano Trio #5, the "Ghost" but the ghost movement eluded us.. we started to play it but ended up giving up...slow movements weren't our friends today. Fortunately we had a rousing finish with Clara Schumann's piano trio. What a nice day!

I think I'm off tomorrow - most of my Sunday group is out of town. That means I'll have time to practice for chamber orchestra...Monday we played a Boccherini symphony and a Stamitz symphony, and got warned that we'd better practice the Dittersdorf symphony that we will be playing on Monday (which I've been diligently practicing at the end of my practice sessions)

and later this week it's travel time again, 3 weeks in a row :-( thougth I was going to get a break but I have these 3 weeks, then a break, and then September I'll start traveling more again....

Great Gig! Fun Weekend!

We played Friday night, the gig was fun. It was a party hosted by one of our members, and we had food, conversation, music, and lots of fun.

We played
--a tango...can't remember what it was
--"Meditation" from Thais, a violin solo with a bunch of us pretending to be the harp accompaniment
--Vivaldi "Summer"
--a Mozart bassoon and cello duet (I got to be the bassoon!)
--Dvorak's "American" quartet

We played really well. Our unison parts in the Vivaldi rocked. I nailed my solo bits in the Dvorak!!! It was very exciting. I like this group because no matter what happens we manage to stay together. There were times when we all saved each other, like the time our first violinst sotto voce told me what measure number we were in when it was clear to him that I was a little lost.

A group of Chinese exchange students came to the party. They literally had just arrived - a friend of our host's son called and asked if he could bring them over. They looked like they enjoyed the music, and took pictures with all of us before they left.

I was very tired on Saturday but was hosting our Saturday group (not the same people who played the night before) but the funny thing was that one of our violists (who attended to listen but not play) said that she had spent time with the Chinese exchange students, who asked if the party was a typical American gathering. Don't we wish that every party had a group playing chamber music!

we had a quintet on Saturday and a lot of fun playing. We started and ended with string trios from Hadyn (people come and go in this group). We played a Bruckner quintet (2 violins, 2 violas, cello) which I had never heard before. It had some really lovely bits and the slow movement was fantastic. Then our violists doubled up and we read the Sibelius "voces intimae" quartet, which I wasn't familiar with but again, just amazing harmonies throughout.

Our Sunday group took the day off after the Friday gig, so I had time to practice! I have a lot to practice; my teacher said that next week he wants to record me playing Bach Arioso and Rachmanioff Vocalise - we haven't recorded me playing that in about a year and I'm playing so much better than a year ago - it will be really cool to hear the difference!

Summer Play

We played lots of string quartets this weekend!

Saturday we played 3 Schubert quartets. One very early (D74) and the op post. 125,1 and I can't remember the other one. Our violist liked them so much that she borrowed the book so that she could see if anyone in her other string quartet had them...so that they could play them for an upcoming gig. They were very readable, fun to play, and sounded really nice. We read the first one and kept going through more because they were so much fun to play.

Today we played a number of pieces, incluing Vivaldi Summer, a 3-cello piece by Beethoven, and the first movement of Beethoven Piano Trio op. 1 no. 1, and ended with Dvorak 'American' quartet. The group has been working on it and today we had a lot of fun playing it. My favorite movement is the 2nd one, which has some awesome cello solo parts. We ended with a high - playing the last movement the best we've played it. We finished and said, wow! that was fun!

Chris Dungey called me yesterday with an update on my new cello - he is hoping to have it done by late summer/early fall. His complication is that he had started my cello with a 2-piece back, and when he decided to switch it to the one piece back, it delayed my cello - the gist of it being that he is working on 2 cellos simultaneously and isn't very well set up to work on more than 1 (given where they are in the process - molding the ribs to the back). He absolutely needs to have it done for the makers competition in November in Portland. He will borrow my cello and enter it into the competition. I am busily trying to improve my playing as much as I can so that I can be ready for it! He also told me that Lynn Harrell is touring and playing almost exclusively with his Dungey cello - I'd love to hear him play that cello...

Gigs

Saturday I'm playing in a studio orchestra for the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program where we will record original music for some student films. I've done this for the past few years and it is always a lot of fun.

A week from Friday my Sunday group has a gig at a local artwalk. I don't have many details other than when to show up! This Sunday I think we'll have to rehearse the program.

Last night our group got together for a potluck and after eating some really yummy food we broke out our instruments (well, I had to borrow our host's cello...he's the one who plays violin, viola, and cello) and tried out a different arrangement of Handel's Entrance of the Queen of Sheba that we liked much better than the string quartet arrangement we've been playing. This arrangement was scored for 2 violins, viola, cello, and 2 oboes and we are going to use this arrangement next week. We also ran through the Bach double violin concerto and it was really fun to hear our 2 soloists play!

And I'm home for 2 weeks!!! The last time that happened was in early March when I had a stretch of almost 2 weeks at home...

Random Notes - while I have some time to post!

I had a rescheduled lesson today, because I was traveling on Friday. I'm off again tomorrow for work, back Wednesday, then out again on Thursday for the holiday weekend to attend a family event. It will be nice to be able to spend most of June at home!

Today's lesson was a continuation of the bowing lesson...I worked really hard all week on making my right hand more flexible, and there was a definite improvement between last week and this week! I have to keep working at this! My control isn't what it should be, especially when practicing fast bows!

On Sunday we had a quartet. I tried to think about playing with a flexible bow hand the whole time and could hear some of the difference in tone and control. We played some gig music (gig on June 6th) to tune it up, and then switched to the Dvorak American quartet. The second movement has such lovely cello solos... After the Dvorak we started reading Beethoven string quartet No. 7, but only got through part of the 1st movement before realizing that we had been playing for over 3 hours and were all toast.

It was so lovely that we got to play outside. Hopefully the neighbors liked what they heard. A few houses down there are some pigs and llamas which I always slow down to see. The llamas were sitting in the shade trying to keep cool. The pigs were resting too...

Feast

Today we had 6 of us, 2 violas no less! For a long time my Saturday chamber group has been 3 of us playing piano trios. I love piano trios but we were longing for a change, and I wanted to play the cello. It started last week when I was gone, but for some reason all sorts of people have found out about our group and are asking to join...

A new violist joined the group. She said that she began playing 7 months ago after a 20-year break. She fit right in and we are happy to have another violist. A string chamber group like ours can never have too many violas! The leader of the other group I play with on Sundays was able to join us today. He is the versatile person who plays violin, viola, and cello, and today he got to play each one (not at the same time, of course!). A new person, a flautist, came too. I felt bad for her. This group reads through music, sometimes not too much slower than speed, and she could not play with us. We had her double with our first violinist, but she spent most of the time sitting there not able to play. We slowed down one fairly easy piece quite a bit, to try to have her join in, but she couldn't keep up even at a slow speed. So, we went back to playing faster. I wonder if she'll come back...this shows how hard it is to find a group to play that is at the right level. This group has been so patient with me during my efforts to keep up. Everyone has been playing for a long time and playing with people who play better than me over the past 2 years has helped me improve my playing.

We started with string trios - a Beethoven Divertmento and a Schubert trio. Then our new violist came and we switched to a Mendelssohn quartet. Then another violinist came and we played quintets for the rest of the time. We played through some of the Schubert 2-cello quintet, the Vivaldi g-minor double cello concerto, and a Mozart string quintet (2 violas! what a luxury!). We played for a very long time today. It was so much fun! My fingers still hurt, though!

New Strings!

I changed my strings today! I'd forgotten how wonderful new strings sound. It was like I'd suddenly improved a lot - all just from the new strings! I use Larsen soloist for my A & D strings, and Piastro Permanent for the G & C strings. The strings had been sitting there for a few months waiting for me to take the time to change them. Actually, I decided to wait until a few weeks before our concert. I need all the help I can get!

Yesterday at my lesson we continued to work on improving the form of my left arm and worked on using it more, especially for speed work. It's amazing how good form improves tone. We were laughing about why my teacher hadn't gotten me to do this before. I feel like I've been constantly making changes to improve form, and I suppose that I haven't been ready to work on this part of my form prior to building up form and technique with other things.

Chamber group this morning was fun. We had a piano quartet again, although people straggled in during the morning. Cello2 (who I'm playing the Popper with) arrived first, so we spent some time reading through some Offenbach cello duets, Op. 52 Nos. 1 & 2. When our violist showed up I switched to the piano and pretended to be a violin for a Hiller string trio. When our violinist showed up we read through a piano quartet by Novak. It had some good moments; the 2nd movement was nice; the 3rd movement felt like a counting exercise (it kept changing from 6/8 to 3/4 to 6/8 to 2/4 to 6/8 to 4/4....so keeping together was pretty challenging). After that I pretended to be a violin again. Our violinist had found a (or perhaps I should say 'the') Puccini string quartet, so I played violin 2. The quartet was pieced together from a variety of manuscripts. He apparently wrote the quartet as a student composition, and none of it survived together. There was even an alternate version of the trio in it. We really liked the last movement of it. Once we finished that we were done for the day.

Random Notes to Start the Month

It's been a while since I've posted - I've been really busy at work and still commuting to the Bay Area nearly every week. Although I heard what I think is good news - tight budgets mean that we have to cut our travel budget - meaning that I hope I get to stay home a bit more!

Today our violist came for the first time in 15 months! She hopefully is cancer-free - she's now in the clear after a year of surgery, etc. It was really good to have her back. We played piano quartets. Mendelssohn Op 1; he had to have been a very young child when he wrote this piano quartet but it already sounds like him. Not a mature (ha! as in 15 years old!) Mendelssohn but most definitely him. We also played the Arthur Foote piano quartet that I've been eager to play for over a year. The slow movement and the last movement of it are spectacular, and the whole piece was a lot of fun to play.

I had a week where I felt like I didn't make much progress, even though I had my usual amount of practice during the week (not enough!). We worked on vibrato again. My teacher had me make some changes to my left hand position, so that when I place my fingers down I am using my arm more to get my hand in position, not hovering over the fingerboard putting fingers down like playing the piano. It was tough trying to figure out how to change my perspective of how my arm/hand/fingers reached for notes, but after a while I finally could do what he asked for a short period before I would lose it. It really helps with speed - I found that I could articulate notes much more cleanly and faster during a fast descent down the A string when I thought about using my arm. It also helps my vibrato.

Tomomrow I will miss my chamber group in order to get together with the other 2 cellists to rehearse the Popper. Hopefully this time my vibrato will be better than the last time we played it!

Random Collection of Happy Things from this Week

--My mother has found a new place to live. She has been in her apartment for about 2 years, after selling the house she and my dad bought not long after they were married and where she lived for 50 years. When we were visiting over Christmas, we had the conversation with her about moving to a place with independent and assisted living...it was much easier than I thought it would be. I'm thankful that she's in good health, but cleaning, cooking, and climbing stairs is getting to be quite difficult for her. She started looking a few weeks ago, and found a place that looks like it will work out very well for her. What a relief. Once she gets dates, etc. we will have to figure out how to get down there to help her pack and move. I'm sure it won't be as traumatic as cleaning through 50 years of things, but I know it will be stressful for her nonetheless.

--A good Popper rehearsal today! I was playing much louder than before and the others liked it and wanted me to play even louder. I also got some tips on how to play my solo parts; need to practice what I learned today. Cello1 told us some stories of her cello journey; including having to overcome her grandfather's objection to girls putting a cello between their legs to some of the national-level competitions she won.

--A really fun end of Saturday chamber group. Piano trios again, with one cellist who doesn't come very frequently. She stayed afterwards so that we could play Scottish and Irish tunes from Renata Bratt's Celtic Grooves for 2 cellos. What fun!!! We alternated playing rhythm and melody on each tune. She started telling me about some of the groups in the area and promised to send links so I could figure out if I could actually make it to a session. She also told me about a week she spent in Canada, on a train, that was a musician's week - Alastair Fraser was on it and she said there were jam sessions in every car every night. Now that sounded like an amazing week...