The First Playing of the Brahms Piano Quintet!

No orchestra rehearsal tonight! We got 3 inches of snow at our house, which doesn't sound like much, but my husband could not get his car up the hill today. He ended up taking my car, effectively keeping me at home all day. It is icy and snowy outside and our conductor emailed us all saying that he was stuck at home because of the ice on the hill by his house. So now I don't feel guilty about having to miss orchestra.

Yesterday I got to play with my Sunday chamber group - Cello2 has a bad cold and cancelled our Popper practice. Everyone in the Sunday group was really happy to see me! The cellos show up early so we can play cello-only music before the rest of the group arrives. We started off with a 3-cello piece by Beethoven. It was an arrangement of a 2-oboe + english horn piece. Now I don't remember what it was but we didn't get through all of it and will finish reading it the next time I'm there. My part was completely in tenor clef and it was challenging reading the thumb position parts in tenor way up there...

When the others showed up I switched to the piano and we (finally!) played through the Brahms Piano Quintet. Wow! It is very challenging for everyone. I finally got to find out which sections of it I don't know well enough to fake. The rest of the group did an awesome first reading. We had to stop and restart and figure out who was playing with whom (or not). The rhythms were challenging too - lots of 2 against 3 or 3 against 4, and lots of triplets where the first note of the triplet was a tied note from the previous beat or a rest. When we finished the scherzo, actually all together, we all laughed with sheer joy and relief. If you hear a recording you can hear the straight 16th notes, but in reality the strings alternate who's playing so counting and being dead on the rhythm is crucial for playing that particular section (the piano is playing all the time but is all over the keyboard - and most of the time at the extreme ends of the keyboard). When we finished the last movement, again, there was lots of laughter of sheer relief. That did us in for the day - it's an exhausting piece. But everyone wants to work on it and play it again!