Sore Fingers

Whew! I have been playing a lot in the last few days. My fingers are sore!

Last night my Sunday chamber group had a gig at a local art festival. It was a lot of fun and one gentleman even said that he thought that he was listening to our favorite classical radio station, KING FM (yeah!, Cello Gal!! my favorite too!). I think he was being really nice but it sure was a nice compliment to hear!

We played the 3rd Brandenburg concerto, Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a couple of Scott Joplin rag tunes, a few pieces from Handel's Watermusic, and some Scotch and Irish airs (Irish drinking songs in an arrangement by Beethoven). It was a lot of fun and many audience members came up afterwards to say how much they enjoyed it. I think we'll even get a few more gigs out of it too. In a move that I don't recommend, it was the first time I had seen the Scotch and Irish airs so I was sightreading when we performed it. The group practices twice a week, and I can't make the Friday practices since practice time is during the day when I'm at work. For some reason I had never had a chance to play those tunes until last night. Fortunately the other cellist in the group does go on Fridays, so I just followed her lead and listened to whomever was playing the melody to figure out what to do. What is really fun about this group is that we're good at listening to each other - I noticed many times when our tempo drifted a little bit that we drifted off together, and returned back into tempo together. The other fun(?) thing was that my partner cellist and I seemed to make the same mistakes! We both screwed up and missed a repeat in the Mozart and both came back in at the same time, together. Like a cat! Like we meant to do it! It was very amusing. We liked the fact that we screwed up together (that example wasn't the only time ) - but that way no one could tell!

This morning my Saturday chamber group met at our other pianist's house. I was thankful that I could at last play the cello - I've been on piano for so many weeks. The group was really not balanced well, though - today we had 3 cellos (at least for a while), 1 piano, and 1 violin. We started out with the first Lalo Piano Trio and then had a real treat. Our violinist sat out (very happily, to listen) while us cellists played the Popper Requiem for 3 Cellos (I've linked to a video of it with the piano reduction of the orchestra score). What a gorgeous piece. I played the 2nd cello part. I had never heard it before, and got teased about not knowing about it - (but what would I know about about the cello repetoire - having been a solo pianist for most of my life???) Afterward we talked about playing it with our orchestra - wouldn't that be fun???? After playing the Requiem (again, the second time for 'redemption', as our pianist put it to describe the decision to take repeats when we were playing the Lalo trio), we played through Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat major (op.100) (with some opportunities for 'redemption'!). If that wasn't enough, we played though Arthur Foote's first piano trio - what fun - I had only played the piano part before and it was so much fun to play the cello part this time. And much easier since I had spent a bunch of times playing through the piano part, reading the score too (pianist's job!). Foote was a late Romantic composer who was entirely educated in the U.S., and then unjustly neglected partially because he had not studied in Europe. We've played through some of his other chamber works and they are wonderful to play and hear. I was exhausted at the end of this, and I still had my lesson to go later in the afternoon!

I have sore fingers...good thing my Sunday group is taking a break...will spend some time on Sunday on some sorely needed practice time instead. More on my lesson later...