Father

Today I am thinking of my dad. He would have turned 64 today. He loved the Beatles (When I'm 64) so for me this year is more significant than next year. Cigarettes cut his life too short 20 years ago.

I don't think I would have been a musician without his help. Almost every musical milestone until I went to university involved him.

My first memory at three, was going to Chedoke Park with him hand in hand and Vivaldi's guitar concerto playing through my mind.

He taught me some folk guitar at 6. He taught me chords at 7. He made me sight read at 10.

I remember his thick orange binder stuffed to to breaking point with photocopies of the entire guitar repertoire (it seemed) of the local library. It was filled with Dowland, Bach, and countless Spanish exercises. I had been playing viola for a few months and had no technique. Didn't matter to him. He would open that 10 lb. 6" book and open to a random page and say "Okay, read this!". And I would read it, always badly. This went on for 5 years. Torture.

He was remarkable. He strived to learn his entire life. Taught himself guitar at the age of 24. He was an incredible nature photographer and painter. Had a passion for science that I didn't see again until I met my husband.

Mendelssohn was his favourite composer. For him, Mendelssohn was a composer who he thought was underrated, a genius in his opinion.

My dad was disappointed that I had never composed since he thought that was the highest calling of being a musician. He implored me not to be "just a music box", not just to be a violist.

I guess maybe I should tell you now that I am not just a violist anymore. Something changed in me this autumn. And I think it quite spooky that the pieces that changed my perspective were two Mendelssohn duets I arranged for voices and string trio. And now composing does not seem as daunting anymore.

I will always miss him. But what he gave to me will always be there. Thank you and love you Dad.

Day 16-Looking Forward

Today (and the last week) has been quite a downer. I don't know if it's the traveling or the lack of sunlight, but I feel quite sad and angry. Or maybe it's the cold...weather and condition.

That's enough rant for now.

Listened to excerpts of the Janacek on Amazon. And if I wish to buy it as an MP3, I can. But I'm not sure I want to. The sound quality of the singers is um, a little nasal for my liking. (Very particular about good singers.) And it's the original version of the winds and piano. It's also interesting that the articulations are quite different and the tempos are slightly slower. Still it gave me a bit of confidence that I am fairly close to performing it decently next April. Now it's time to get to the next level. And it's time to rest it for a month and get back to it in the third week of December. (And buy the score in the meantime. There's lots of imitation between the singers and the viola.)

And the recording today? It was the Campagnoli caprice no. 31 again. I worked though most of the middle section and made nice progress. In spite of the fact that my mood was very stressed and sad, I was able to still work. Good because the mood is temporary but the work remains to be done regardless. In the past if I had a bad day, it would be frequently turn out to be a day of non-practicing. Sometimes it would even extend to a stretch of a few weeks. Not a great way to become an artist. The work and practicing should be for a lifetime and a process-not a goal in itself. After having children, I realized that it was important to practice every day even for a few minutes. Also it was important to always try to improve and learn new things to feed the artistic soul. These ideas sustained me when I was not allowed to work for almost two years. And now it still does with the new challenges facing me.

Looking forward to two things in the near future. This week I will be in an orchestra for a couple of Messiah performances. I have played it about 40 times and never get tired of it. The conductor will be first rate. And a strange surprise for the violist. In no. 11 (the bass aria "The People That Walked in Darkness"), the viola part has many *treble* clef, violin-range passages in this particular edition. Strange. Good thing for looking at the part ahead of time. The rest is easy and the violas are tacet quite a bit so we get to see the violinists do their gymnastics in the tenor aria.

Also thinking a lot about a new project after this one. Have decided on something and it is rather silly, but I need to do it. Relates to that always trying to learn new things issue. When it's ready to go, I'll let you know.

'Til tomorrow!

Day 13-no shame

I am getting so callous and desensitized to the voice recorder, that I will even record ahem, sight reading...

And laugh at my note mistakes and bad shifting in the Caprice no. 31. And dropping my bow 10 measures before the end.

(A quirk...tend to do this at least once a month. Fortunately only once in performance 15 years ago. Unfortunately it was the last part of Britten's Lachrymae. Every violist will know what I'm talking about...though I did catch the bow in midair. But it wrecked the emotional oomph of the piece.)

I guess this is all fine and very different from 7 years ago. Then I was preparing for an audition and I put myself on a practice plan. Got this idea from the fabulous and basically unknown book, Performing Your Best by Tom Kubistant. He talks about the performance cycle and training for each part of the cycle. It's wonderful and I modified it for using it in preparation for concerts. Seems to add to sense of more time...

When I felt like I knew the orchestral excerpts very well, I would steel myself for the recording session. And take a day off before the recording and a day after. Dreading hearing the result. I treated it like a special event. And in retrospect it wasn't.

It's also interesting to see how short the recording sections have been during the last thirteen days. Usually around 45 seconds and never more than three minutes. And I dreaded that at the beginning? Guess some things take up more space in the mind than in real life.

This shamelessness is translating to Facebook. On a friend adding frenzy...

See you tomorrow for Day 14. Realize now that I could go to a Day 17.

Should I?

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.

Day 3

Posting with a monkey on my back (AKA the little one). Part of my soon to fail strategy to keep the kids up an extra hour, so when the time change comes tonight, they will wake tomorrow at 6 am instead of 5 am new time.

I listened to the sound check (Day 2 recording) from yesterday. Dennis was right, the hall made the instruments sound tinny, particularly the viola and the upper register of the piano. Though I liked performing in the space, since it was easy to hear everyone else. In the concert I tried to adjust my sound by using my bow closer to the fingerboard in legato passages to smooth the sound out. I'm very curious to hear how that concert sounds. In time...

So for today I decided to play one of my favourite Campagnoli caprices (no. 17). It's a theme and variations in e minor. Quite fun. I hadn't looked at it for probably four months. It didn't matter because there was/is no reason to play it in a concert. Good thing because I was making a few mistakes in every section and it sometimes felt like sight reading. When I made a mistake I knew that it will be on the recording and then a strange thing happened. I started to play to the silly voice recorder and enjoyed playing the mistake. Then I just started playing random things. And it really didn't sound so bad on the playback.

For some reason in the past when a tape recorder was on, I would become incredibly self conscious and try to do and play the right thing. And a lot of the time I would feel very boxed in and not be as expressive. After a few years of this, I coped by playing for the tape recorder and waiting one or two days to have some emotional distance to finally analyze the result. Now I'm getting rid of the distance and treating the recorder as a friend and something to play with.

Went back to the caprice and just imagined it like an audience. Much better.

Very happy that this is happening after only three days.

In the dark

I became rather amused when looking at my stat counter today. Yesterday someone had Googled "Penderecki Cadenza" and got my blog. This is strange because I've hardly written anything about it. And I actually don't want to know anything about it at this moment.

In the past when getting a new piece, most of the time I would proceed to research it thoroughly. I would look at the score, look up the history of the piece, listen to recordings of all the famous violists playing the piece. And I would become thoroughly intimidated. Especially when listening to the recordings. I would think that it would be very difficult to learn this piece. And even now there are some pieces for me that still have this stigma attached to them. The Walton concerto and the Hindemith solo sonatas are examples.

So I have been living in a cave and have never heard a Penderecki piece. And all I know about the Cadenza is that it was written in 1984 and was related to the Viola Concerto. That's it. And yes it's hard. Not a problem. I will just use the choice practice techniques that have served me well over the last five years. Singing. Three note overlap. Metronome Games. Divide and Conquer.

Just remembering the pieces I learned first without knowing too much about them. In a way these pieces are more solid and belong more firmly in my repertoire. Pieces like the Britten Lachrymae and the Barnes Lamentations of Jeremiah. Those pieces I learned very quickly and didn't have access the resources or the recordings. I remember the excitement of learning these works. Like reading a great novel that you knew nothing about it.

Maybe the Penderecki Cadenza will be that for me again.

Making Peace with Schumann

So next week I'm playing a concert with some of my friends....

On the program will be:

Brahms E flat sonata
Debussy cello sonata
and

the Schumann piano quartet.

I basically chose a lot of the program. And for some reason for which I don't understand, I chose the Schumann. Which a few years ago would never have done so.

You see until recently I've had a love-hate relationship with this composer. Mostly hate.

It dates all the way back to 1990.....when I was given Marchenbilder to learn in second year at university. Well, I learned the last movement, performed it and then put it away for a year and a half. Dug it out again for my fourth year recital. And then promptly proceeded to destroy it in the performance. My mark reflected this sorry effort.....

[You see dear blog reader(s)-you have to understand that until about seven years ago I was not a good violist. Well maybe sometimes.....I was like the little girl with the curl on her forehead.....how I became a better player-well that's another post.]

Schumann was the mirror that showed all my faults as a player.

Bad intonation, check.
Shifting inadaquacies, check.
Strange tone colour, check.

And so on....

It was the beginning of a very difficult three years culminating the near end of my relationship with the viola-well that's another story too.

The other problem was that Schumann did not affect me emotionally like other composers. Like Brahms and Bach. Just didn't get it.

Fast forward 7 years to 1999, Berkeley.

Working in a violin shop, just looking for something to listen to for background music. Discovered two recordings.

Janos Starker's recording of the Fantasy Pieces
Horszowski 's recording of the Kinderszenen, Op. 15

The latter held my attention for months. Started to like Schumann just a little.

2000, NOI, Maryland.

Schumann's Symphony No. 3

After playing this piece, not so fond......difficult to play in many ways. (Disclaimer-maybe I just was tired because the same concert included Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances the *hardest* piece I ever played probably always will be)

Okay-all done with Schumann. I'll stick with Brahms, thank you....

Fall 2006, Central Vermont.

Driving around with the kids listening to the radio. And then the Schumann Third comes on. Should be home in 5 minutes. Drive around for 30 to hear the whole piece. I couldn't believe it...Schumann is now one of my favorites. And now I get it.......

Back to work!