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 ...
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