The point of it all...

After all the stress of Friday, I am glad to say that Saturday turned out to be a wonderful day.

It was an early start - we left the house at 7:30am, which is quite painful for a Saturday and the doors opened at 9am.  After registration and general introduction, we were straight into the sectional rehearsals - done with just the amateur participants.  I was rather alarmed to find that I was the only one on first oboe so it was definitely straight in at the deepend.  It wasn't too scary in the end though as the general atmosphere was very encouraging and supportive, everyone was finding the music hard.  The 90 minutes rehearsal flew by and is was soon lunch time.

After lunch it was full orchestral rehearsal for nearly 3 hours (with a tea break fortunately).  The professional players joined us for this which made it a bit less scary - they covered the hardest bits, made sure we came in at the right time, but also took a little bit of  back seat when it came to the solos to let the participants have a go.  It was really great to hear the whole piece come together and the sound was amazing. 

Just time for a cup of tea and a piece of cake before the final performance.  The concert was great fun, the sound was fab and, despite my misgivings about the difficulty of the music, we pulled it off.  I think the professionals were definitely covering a lot of the Stravinsky bits but I still managed the (very short) exposed oboe bits in the Beceuse. The Gershwin was definitley my highlight though - a really, really fun piece to play that I don't think I would ever have had the opportunity to play!

So overall, a fantastic day which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to.  I managed to play more of the music than I thought I would and both my reed and lip lasted to the end despite about 5-6 hours playing.  I really enjoyed joining with other people and playing beautiful music in a fabulous concert hall.  This really is the point of all the lessons and practice after all.

We played:
Walton - Crown Imperial (a good warm up opener)
Gershwin - An American in Paris (some amazing solos from the brass and clarinets, great fun!)
Stravinsky - Firebird extract, Infernal Dance to the end (challenging but we pulled it off)

Concert, Gershwin, Reeds

The concert on Saturday went well I think.  The venue was lovely, my reed worked and we had a good turn out.  One of my friend's came to see me and she really enjoyed it, which was lovely.  I quite enjoyed it in the end but I didn't really engage with the pieces in the same way I had at other concerts and it did feel as if we hadn't really had enough weeks to practice.  Some of the pieces still felt slightly unfamiliar, which was rather disconcerting.  I think - aside from the Elgar - my favourite bits were the second movement of the Arnold Suite and the Britten dances.  We have two more rehearsals before summer break, though I can only make the first one.  I am looking forward to seeing what we do.

On Sunday I felt a bit overplayed so I didn't do a proper practice session.  But I did have a look at Gershwin's American in Paris which I am playing in an Orchestral playday in June.  I have been looking at bits of it but I had a go playing it with a You Tube recording for the first time.  It really is very difficult.  It actually made me feel rather stressed about the whole event because I know that there are bits that are just beyond me.  I think I need to make this a priority for practice over the next few weeks.  But one of the biggest problems is the speed of articulation required - which I have been working on but is not a quick fix.

I also picked up my reed making again.  I had a go at sharpening my reed knives - reasonably successfully I think.  I began scraping the three reeds I tied on a couple of weeks ago and very soon had 3 cracked reeds.  I'm not sure if it was a problem with tying on, not soaking enough before trying to scrape or just a bad batch of cane. I probably need to do the initial scrape immediately after tying on though when I know that the cane is well and truly soaked through.    I will do some more tying on later this week.

"Non-lesson" practice piling up!

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.