Day 9 recording and story time

Another post...

Before I did the recording today, I read through a Canadian piece for viola and piano...written by one of my close friends from university. Looks and sounds like a wonderful piece. Cool to know the composer and be able to email her to ask questions about said piece. And have her write back within the hour. Ah the power of twenty-first century communication...

(I didn't record that. Well not yet. Only had the piece for two hours.)

Next up was the Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev is very special to me-in fact a talisman. I actually credit Prokofiev with helping me win an important audition.

When I was living in Toronto in the late '90s, I went to play regularly for an orchestra in a city 5 hours away. More than half the orchestra was from out of town so we were all put up in a hotel. Lots of fun and good memories, but not going to write about it here today. Not that type of blog...

We played some really great and often difficult music. One concert had Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. And it was difficult for the violas, especially the third movement which has a exposed secondary theme that reaches up to the E-flat above high C. Spent many hours on that for shifting and intonation and am also grateful that it's not an orchestral excerpt. (Conductors-don't get any ideas.)

But the first movement haunted me. The steady rhythm of the continuous sixteenths lived in my head for weeks afterwards. So when I discovered a month later I actually had a tape of this piano concerto (bought five years previously at Sam the Record Man for a dollar), I was thrilled. And then listened to it all the time. Get a little obsessive about pieces sometimes.

A few months later, I was auditioning for NOI, in Ann Arbor. It was about 3 hours from where my husband was finishing grad school. So we decided to go together. Actually I decided since I didn't drive and he did. Well we decided to take a different route- instead of going through Detroit, go through Port Huron and then go south through Michigan. Big. big. mistake.

We got stuck in horrible traffic-worse than I had ever seen in Toronto and there was tons of construction and detours. Getting nervous because the audition time was getting closer and closer. We got to UM a mere 5 minutes before the audition time. Fortunately the audition person and the main administrator (didn't know this at the time) was a nice person and said that I could have an extra 15 minutes to get settled. And I needed it. The list included concerto (Hindemith), Don Juan, Mozart 35, Beethoven 5 etc..

I really needed to calm down so after doing the absolute minimum warm up, I put on my tape machine with the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto and just listened to the first movement for a few minutes. Calmed me down enough to do the audition. And more than rhythmical enough to make me temporarily rhythmical too. That is to say feel the beat so solidly...for fifteen minutes.

And I did well. Got into the program and it was a turning point just because I learned so much in those three weeks, I am still reaping the benefits today though I still haven't used all the tips yet. (They live in the pedagogy journals on the bookshelf.)

So almost ten years later, finally getting serious about practicing with a metronome. Seems fitting that it's Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. The main problem for me is compressing the beat when it's a dotted rhythm. I get ahead of myself. Worked on the main theme of the last movement with the metronome games. Then recorded...it's better but still a slight rushing to each new beat. Back to the drawing board tomorrow. And wonder if I can get a new version of Prokofiev's Third Concerto on the MP3 player...still love the piece.