Weekend report

It was so nice to be home this weekend and to spend time playing music. As much fun as it was to be in Barcelona, missing out on 2 weekends at home really took it out of me.

Friday night's lesson was good. I had started working on exercises to loosen up my wrist, so we took a look at what I've been doing and my teacher made a few suggestions. Then we spent time looking at the 3rd cello part for Popper's Requiem. We are definitely going to play it with the orchestra, probably in March. I spent time this week playing bits and pieces of all 3 parts very slowly, to start burning it into my brain.

My Saturday chamber group finally met again - we've had quite a break with people traveling. There were only 3 of us, so I spent the whole time on the piano. Since I hadn't played the piano in a while it was a good workout. We warmed up with 2 Haydn piano trios, and then moved on to 2 Dvorak piano trios. We played an early trio, Bflat major, op. 21, and one in G minor (op. 26). I recognized the G minor trio once we started playing it. We definitely want to play this one again. Then we finished up with a piano trio by Fibich (it apparently was Czech composer day) and then we were finished.

My Sunday group is rehearsing for a gig in 3 weeks. The end was fun. For some reason every flautist I have ever met wants to play Claude Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. So, I am playing the piano for one of the flautists in the group. We're playing the first piece in the suite. Now I'm most definitely a classical stiff so jazz is tough for me. After the end of practice today we played a few of the pieces together (the first to rehearse and then the others for fun) and I think we sounded pretty good. In the limited piano practice time I have I've been starting the piece we're playing cold, with no warmup, to simulate what my hands will feel like when we perform it in a few weeks.

Tomorrow night is orchestra, and then on Tuesday I am off to Pocatello to go visit Christopher Dungey, to get started on my new cello! More on that this week!