3 December 2009:We got new music at orchestra last night, so now I can share the programme for the spring concert (27 March 2010! Don’t say I didn’t give you enough advance warning this time!):
- Vaughn Williams: ‘Wasps’ overture
Debussy: ‘Petite Suite’ (originally written for the piano, four hands, in 1889, and arranged for orchestra by Henri Bussex in 1909)
Butterworth: ‘The Banks of Green Willow’
Haydn: Symphony no. 83 ‘The Hen’
Sight-reading new music is always an… interesting experience. I can give you the correct rhythm, or the correct notes, not both, especially on something I’m not familiar with, like the Debussy. (Or something like Vaughn Williams, whose music I am familiar with and adore, but who is, erm, somewhat eclectic in his use of rhythm and key signatures, I am discovering now that I have the chance to see the scores.) On the other hand, I aced the Haydn. It’s nice that it was the last thing we did before we left.
7 December 2009:Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, where we worked the pieces for which I was playing new lines. Last group class I volunteered to move from the first line of ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ to the second line in order to keep it on the programme. We’ve been working on this piece for an entire year. It wasn’t ready for last Christmas so it was bumped to the spring, and it wasn’t ready then either so it was rescheduled for this Christmas. And then we lost one of our musicians, which left our youngest cellist on this piece alone on the second line, and he needs someone steady to keep him on beat. I love this piece, especially in this arrangement, and we’ve all worked so hard that I didn’t want to see it cut. I’ve worked hard on the top line, too; it’s the melody, and it’s got some soaring bits and challenging shifts that I’ve really polished. But cutting it would disappoint everyone, so I stepped up and said I’d move to the second line if it meant keeping it. The other song I’ve moved lines on is V’la l’bon vent (do click through to the YouTube video of the McDades singing it, holy wow), a French Canadian winter song that I only heard for the first time this fall when I’d been assigned the piece. Our arrangement was done by my teacher’s father, and it has a lovely little swirling wind theme in the second part. It’s a call and response song that overlaps, so the timing is everything, and after learning the timing of the top line having to recast the timing for the second line, even though the line is simple, is breaking my brain a bit. When I played my part of the duet recital piece M and I are doing I had the very encouraging comment that my teacher really had nothing else to tell me. We could, of course, tweak and finesse till the cows come home, but with a week till recital it’s as solid as it needs to be. I am so happy about this. One more duet rehearsal on Tuesday, then the dress rehearsal on Saturday morning, and the recital is next Sunday.
13 December 2009:
The Christmas recital was fine. I preferred the dress rehearsal version, but the different venue may have influenced that. I had a weird disconnect happen about fifteen bars into the duet where my left hand went to the completely wrong place on the fingerboard (wrong position, wrong notes, wrong everything) in a place where I have never had a problem ever, but overall it was all right. The unison bits were lovely, and I stuck the landing. Our last piece was pretty good, too, so hopefully we left them all with a good impression.
When we got there I went right into the seniors’ residence where we do our concerts, and the boys went around back to the snowy yard, because we’d promised the boy he could play in the snow until it was time for the concert. Apparently they found rabbit tracks, which kept the boy busy for quite some time. While they were out there it started to snow again, too, which wasn’t a surprise; light flurries had been predicted (although what we got was pretty much a heavy snowstorm). In fact, they had so much fun they actually missed the beginning of the concert, but they got in and settled down to enjoy most of it.
As I mentioned earlier, I preferred the dress rehearsal version, but the different venue may have influenced that. I had a weird disconnect happen about fifteen bars into the duet where my left hand went to the completely wrong place on the fingerboard (wrong position, wrong notes, wrong everything) in a place where I have never had a problem ever, but overall it was all right. The unison bits were lovely, and I stuck the landing. I felt off in every group piece except the opening one, though (and in the Ave Verum Corpus, in which I was playing a line I’d been switched to a week ago and played it very well, but the piece didn’t feel tight overall). Our last piece was pretty good, too, and it was a challenging all-cello version of the William Tell theme, complete with a guest flute playing the opening theme. Hopefully we left them all with a good impression. I was so proud of the littlest girls; they’ve improved audibly and visibly in the year since I’ve met them. And it’s so interesting to hear other students play pieces I’ve played before; everyone does them differently.
17 December 2009:
Work news: Now that we’ve confirmed it, I am all backflippy to announce that I am doing the book design for Emily Wright’s upcoming A Cellist’s Manual. I am thrilled to be working with Emily on this project, and to be working on a book about one of my main interests and areas of… er… I can’t call it expertise, but fifteen-years-of-familiarity doesn’t roll off the tongue too smoothly. Anywhats, yay for Emily, and yay for book design, and yay for working on a super awesome cool project!
22 December 2009:
A lovely, lovely carol singalong tonight with the Preston-LeBlancs, marred only by the boy’s meltdown when it got to be an hour past his bed time (first because he wanted to go home, then because he wanted to stay). We did get there later than I wanted to, because the boys got home later than I expected, but we had a wonderful time when we settled down at last. We had a lovely buffet of hot hors d’oeuvres and cheese and nummy little things, and drinks, and opened presents before turning to the music. Both sets of children were enchanted with their respective gifts, and other than the same CD we exchange every year (no, it’s not like regifting fruitcake; every year we buy one another a specific CD so we both have a copy), they gave me a print of one of my favourite Waterhouse paintings, St. Cecelia, which positively glowed in its heavy gilt frame when we saw it in person last month at the MMFA exhibition. The reproduction is surprisingly good, much better than most of those done of Waterhouse’s other works.
We were a guitar, a recorder, and a cello, each sightreading; always interesting! The adults gamely improvised Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman for the kids, and we had lovely versions of Away in a Manger and Silent Night, and courageous attempts at other carols. The boy squeezed in between my oldest goddaughter and myself and we sang Silent Night together (this version was all open strings on the cello, so I didn’t need to actually read the music), the boy looking up at me with a smile and copying the shapes of my mouth to sing the sounds. With his quickness at absorbing music and words, it ought to be easy to familiarise him with the traditional carols like the Gloucestershire Carol, Coventry Carol, and the Holly and the Ivy. I foresee a proper Solstice mix CD next winter.
I love this tradition our godfamilies share. Most of us could have kept on playing for a good long time, but small persons have their limits. Next year, we’ll definitely do this on a weekend afternoon in order to have more time to actually play and sing, although there’s something special about doing it at night, with the midwinter darkness outside the snow-framed windows that reflect the twinkling lights on the tree.
