Canada Day Concert Redux

It is my very great pleasure to share with you the video taken of the entire Canada Day concert.

Bless Martine and Daniel for shooting the HD footage, for editing it and posting it to YouTube; and even more so for burning all those concert DVDs for the orchestra members! It was a real treat to sit back and enjoy the concert the way the audience did, and as the Blu-Ray player and TV are hooked up to the surround stereo and subwoofer, I got to hear the orchestra in all its glory. (Okay, the church is very echoey, and at times our articulation isn't as clear as it could have been and those two issues = occasional muddy sound, but hey! There's sound to be heard!) And I appreciate it all the more because my audio recording was such a miserable mess.

Calixa Lavallée's O Canada

Schubert: Symphony No 3 in D Major

1. Adagio maestoso - Allegro con brio

2. Allegretto

3. Menuetto - Trio

4. Presto vivace



Vaughan Williams: Suite of English Folk Songs

1. March - Seventeen Come Sunday

2. Intermezzo - My Bonny Boy

3. March - Folk Songs from Somerset



Fauré's Pavane



Grieg: Norwegian Dances

1. Allegro Marcato

2. Allegretto tranquillo e grazioso

3. Allegro moderator alla Marcia

4. Allegro molto



Encores

1. Vaughn Williams suite excerpt

2. sing along O Canada

Overall, I am very pleased with my performance in this video. Two things leap out at me. One, I tend to make small faces while I play, mostly tightening of the mouth during different phrases. It's not in reaction to mistakes, it's more like... expression. It probably can't be seen from the audience, but seeing it on screen when the camera was on the celli was very odd. This summer I'm going to work on relaxing the muscles around my mouth when I play. And two, I've been working on lowering my right elbow, and damn it, every once in a while it pops up like a chicken wing. Down, elbow! Down! Something else to work on this summer.

There were a couple of places in the video when I waved my hands at the screen and said, "The celli! The CELLI! They have the theme, the violins are just playing a repeated note -- pan RIGHT!" And there was the odd place where the camera would pan to the brass... just in time for them to lower their instruments. But those are understandable in a live recording, and really, I'm just thrilled to have the record of the event. Especially on DVD! Merci encore, Martine et Daniel, vos efforts et votre générosité sont vraiment appréciés!

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* The original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal
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Sharing

One thing I love about the Internet (hello, Internet!) is that it's good for sharing stuff with millions of people you've never met.

Allow me to share some music with you.

I discovered Philip Sheppard almost exactly two years ago. He's a cellist and a very talented composer. I used to have his MySpace page open while I worked on other things so I could listen to his posted tracks on an endless loop. I got other people hooked, too, muah-hah-hah.

Now he's posting more and more tracks, some free to download as mp3s, others embedded within his web site. As a start, visit this page to listen to a selection of his haunting piano pieces. A handful of free mp3s for download can be found here. There are other embedded pieces of various styles scattered throughout the site's pages, too, as well as a free download of sheet music for his lovely Crystallized Beauty theme, arranged for two pianos.

Enjoy!

@PhilipSheppard
Radiomovies (Philip Sheppard's official blog and web site)
Philip Sheppard's MySpace page


* The original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal

And In Unrelated News...

This morning, while I was composing the very-difficult-to-write post about my newfound chocolate sensitivity, I received word that I won a year's subscription to Strings magazine plus a $100 gift basket from an LA luthier for a 250-word contest entry I wrote on Emily Wright's online teaching technique via her cello blog.

Whee!

This was especially nice, because I didn't do it for the prize; I did it because Emily was looking for an idea of how readers interpret her lessons and approach. Of course, the prize is really quite nice too, because who wouldn't want a goodie bag of cello-related stuff? (Er. Anyone who is a cellist, that is. I have no idea what most of you would do with such a thing. No, wait, yes I do: You'd give it to me!) The subscription is timely because I was going to have to let my subscription to Strings lapse this fall; it's too expensive for me right now.

So. Yes. What a lovely surprise.

I really need to get back to working on the taxes.

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* The original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal
~

First Lesson In Ten Years

On Sunday after lunch I headed out for a baby shower forty-five minutes away, which was lovely, but which I had to leave early because I had my first cello lesson with my new teacher to attend. I wore my funky red shoes for confidence at the lesson, and a pair of new pants I'd just hemmed. I mistimed the travel (stupid bridge work one way but not the other) and halfway there I realized that I'd be half an hour early if I went straight to the lesson, so I stopped at the needlework shop to buy the needles I needed for my next knitting project. (Note: 'Next' implies I've ever finished one. I have failed miserably at every knitting project I've ever tried. But I have begun a new one [armwarmers for me] and have decided to heroically attempt a hat for the newly hairless Mousme.) I went from the needlework shop to my lesson and was ten minutes early anyway. Sigh. I made a critical decision and unpicked the new hems on my pants with my Swiss army knife. When someone else showed up for the group lesson I unloaded the cello and walked into my teacher's house behind her.

It was odd: I was both nervous and not about this lesson. My first lesson with the new teacher was supposed to be a private one last Thursday, but last week was a disaster of sick people and forcing four days of work into the only two I ended up having free to work, so it didn't happen. Instead, the once-a-month group lesson ended up being my first. I am, as I repeatedly point out yet people seem to disbelieve because I do an impressive job pretending otherwise, extremely shy, so walking into an established social group of ten people was daunting. What's the etiquette? Where do I put my stuff? Did I take someone's parking spot? Am I sitting in someone's customary seat? At the same time, I knew my teacher and one other student, having played with them in the orchestra for seven and three years respectively, so I had something of a lifeline. (The other student and fellow orchestra member was pretty new as well, as her other teacher had only recently stopped teaching; I don't know if she'd done a group lesson yet or not. I believe she had, but it might have been only one.) The little coffee break between the youngest cellists' lesson and the group lesson was the most awkward, so awkward for me that I took a cup of coffee to have something to do with my hands. (I am not a coffee drinker; it usually doesn't agree with me. However, it was really, really good coffee, which was nice.) Eventually we settled and our teacher put us in various places around the room, we tuned, and started playing.

This is the point where I actually relaxed. I know, I know; normally I'd be tense about playing in a small group with people I don't know. But somewhere a couple of minutes in, I realised that I didn't suck. I am used to expecting to be/actually being of a lower technical proficiency than others. Here I was at par with, or even more confident than, others in the group. The beginning was rocky because I was having trouble hearing my intonation, but then something clicked and then it was all okay. There was the disaster of misplacing my hand badly when I had to go really high up while sight-reading an arrangement of Satie's 'Gymnopedie', but hey, sight-reading for fun; no harm, no foul. (Lovely, lovely pieces in that Cellobrations collection for cello quartet, I hope we play lots of them in the future.) I enjoyed it all so much that I played one of the new pieces I was given at the lesson when I got home while the boy was in the bath ( "Is Mama playing her cello for me? While I'm in the bath?" followed by appreciative applause when I'd done), and after I'd put him to bed I sat down for another hour and really worked on bowings and phrasing for 'Itsumo Nando Demo,' the song Sandman7 and I are working on. It took me the whole hour to play bits with different bowings, make a decision one way or the other, and put slurs and bowings in for the entire piece to get it to where I was happy with the phrasing. Next comes recording it while I play it in this version and listening to it to see if it actually works from an audience POV.

Also, my teacher showed us the most adorable Twinkle bow, a fully functional miniature bow used to teach children how to hold it correctly and to use the proper wrist and elbow motions. Because it's so tiny you can't help but hold it properly in order to get the maximum yield from the hair. We squealed when we saw it.

It was a great introduction to the group and to working with the new teacher. I'm looking forward to the next group lesson, which is in a month's time. After that there's a December dress rehearsal and then a performance at a group home.

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* The original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal
~

Morning Link

Someone woke up at four-thirty, and I didn't get back to my bed till five-twenty... and didn't fall asleep till six-thirty. And then someone woke up again at seven. Did I mention I only got to sleep at one? And that my damn MP3 player was discovered to be dead after only four hours of use so I couldn't use it to fall asleep?

Needless to say, I am not firing on all cylinders this morning.

Here's one of the interesting links I ran across this morning: Cellist and teacher Emily Wright talks about the obsession with performing perfectly, and suggests instead that a public performance is a chance to show people where you are at that moment, not your ultimate level of perfection:

Perfection is important in aircraft engines, prescription doses and shark cages. What makes art great is that perfection can actually detract from our visceral enjoyment of it. Vibrato mars pitch, and we love it. Van Gogh skewed his room, and it speaks to something profound inside of us. Gil Shaham's skittering spiccato bow is thrilling, and he risks everything in each performance, and most of the time, it pays a very precise dividend. But even when a note or two escapes him it is well worth it, because he makes himself so vulnerable to (and is at peace with) the possibility of catastrophe.

(Originally posted in longer form at the main journal Owls' Court.)

Cello Hero?

So it seems that cellists may have an edge when playing Guitar Hero:

On the whole, a musical background seems to help Guitar Hero players. Zach Whitsell’s mother, Betty Whitsell, said her son has played violin, cello and saxophone in the past.

Ming Cheng, a 17-year cello player, said he was able to play the game on the medium level in the store before purchasing the game. He placed fourth in the 16-and-up age bracket on Saturday.

Cello players might have an advantage in the game, Cheng said. He explained that the spacing between the buttons on the controller is almost identical to the spacing between fingers on the strings of a cello.

“It keeps my fingers in shape for cello,” Cheng said. “I don’t have to practice as much.”

Except:

[Guitar player] Bloomfield is able to strum the notes up and down, which helps boost speed, Cheng said.

“I normally only strum down,” he said. “It’s more accurate, but I get tired faster.”

Which is a problem I have encountered myself. So when I saw this really interesting video called 'Taking Trips to America' promoting the album Block Ice and Propane by cellist jazz alternative musician composer-type person Erik Friedlander yesterday, I was fascinated. Don't miss the video of Erik performing 'Yakima' at the bottom of the page.