I've suddenly realised that I have an awful lot of orchestral pieces to practice - in addition to normal lesson work and that maybe I need to be a bit more organised about it. So I spent last night doing a review to see where I am up to with everything and which pieces need some personal practice, in the hope that it will then seem more manageable. This is what I came up with:
Regular Orchestra (concert 17th March, 4 orchestral rehearsals to go)
Borodin- Steppes of Central Asia - no issues
Tchaikowsky - Sleeping Beauty - think I've sorted the scalic runs now so should be fine.
Glinka - Russlan and Ludmilla - again, although fast, the notes are fairly straightforward.
Borodin - Petit Suite - small sections in the final movement that I need to look at - I need to process all the double sharps!
Mussorgsky - Night on Bare Mountain - most of this is OK but I think I need to go through a couple of times on my own to tidy up bits.
Overall pretty good shape with a little bit of tidying up to do.
Teacher's orchestra (concert 21 April, 7 orchestral rehearsals to go)
Stravinsky - Rite of Spring - lots of issues!
Actually part 1 is in pretty good shape. I need to keep working on part 2, mainly slow work with metronome to try and get the rhythm right and then keep speeding up. Quite a long way to go on this with a good number of rehearsals so hopefully it will come together.
Regular Orchestra (concert 19 May)
We will start work on this after the March concert - have no idea what the programme will be yet!
Playday "Superorchestra" - (concert 16 June, rehearsals on the day only!)
Gershwin - American in Paris
Stravinsky - Firebird (extract)
Walton - Crown Imperial
I need to keep plugging away at these, a little every day. I will get some recordings of them to help, in the absence of rehearsals. The Walton seems reasonably straight forward apart from the speed! So I am just clicking up the metronome bit by bit.
Firebird is more straight fowrard than Rite of Spring and we are only doing an extract. I've worked through about a quarter of it so far.
Gershwin I've not really look yet, it looks rhythmically complicated and it is quite long so I need to get stuck into this.
I'd liked to have at least played my way through all of these by the end of March so then it will just be a case of getting the speed up and working on the trickiest bits.
Conclusion
It's kind of in hand - I need a bit of a push this week for March concert and can then focus on Rite of Spring while still doing 5 minutes a day on the stuff for June. And yes it does feel more manageable now.
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