A night of Russian Music

Saturday was our orchestra concert, our programme was:

Borodin - Steppes of Central Asia
Borodin - Petite Suite
Glinka - Ruslan and Ludmilla
 ~ interval ~
Mussorgsky - Gopak
Mussorgsky - Night on Bare Mountain
Tchaikovsy - excerpts from Sleeping Beauty

It generally went a lot better than I expected it to.  The afternoon rehearsal was really rather ropey in parts and I was a bit worried that it would all fall to pieces a bit.  I should have known that my fear was unfounded.  There were some challenging moments on the night, a few entries in the Glinka were not quite where they should be,  we were not quite together for parts of Bare Mountain.  But, overall, I think it was the best we had ever played the programme as a whole and, from my perspective at least, there were a few spine tingling moments that made me (once again) proud to be part of this orchestra.  The shimmering violins in the Steppes of Central Asia sounded just magical, our 80+ year old Cor player who has been struggling with the solo part really pulled it out of the bag on the night and really did herself, and us, proud.  The sound of the full orchestra really going for it at the beginning of the Glinka made my heart sing. In Bare mountain we all nailed the sudden stop before it begins winding up with the bassoon chromatic scale....you could have heard a pin drop.  The solos at the end of the piece with flute and clarinet were just beautifully played.  I really enjoyed my duet with the flute in the Sleeping Beauty waltz and I managed to get the scale right in the middle of it. 

I hope that the audience enjoyed it as much as we did.  We had a modest but respectable number of people there.  I do wonder sometimes if amateur orchestras at our level are actually more fun to be in than to listen to - certainly our audience could have heard better performances elsewhere.  But I think an amateur concert is about more than just playing music.

I loved  this  article about amateur orchestras - which can be summed up by the following quote:

“A typical effort will be littered with a continuum of faults. The problem is that audiences, weaned on the synthetic perfection of commercial recordings, tend to be unthinkingly intolerant of faults in even live professional performances, let alone amateur ones. I argue (long and hard) that audiences must tailor their expectations, just as do those who tolerate the sound of ancient recordings, to 'listen through' the surface imperfections to the music that lies beneath. The tolerant are richly rewarded. Enthusiastic amateurs, perpetually striving against their limitations, restore to Music what is lost to the prosaic professional: the elements of risk and danger; the familiar becomes new, challenging, exciting!”

On Saturday we certainly stepped out of our comfort zone,  it was risky for us but exhilerating to feel like we succeeded in pulling it off.  Now on to the next one, continuing to strive against our limitiations...

"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.

Recovery and catching up

Saturday was a really good day with lots of playing....but it does seem to have completely upset my practice routine.  Obviously I couldn't practice on Saturday and Sunday my lips were so sore that playing was not an option.  By Monday I thought I would have recovered but my embouchure stamina seemed to have gone completely and even at orchestra yesterday I was struggling.  I have my lesson tonight and don't really feel as prepared as I should be. 

Due to the missed days of practice, I tried to spend Monday's practice session really focussing on the Luft study.  I spent a long time on this one - which is in Ab major.  This is my least favourite key as the fingering is rather awkward on the oboe, so this study has been good for practising fluency of left hand Eb fingering and use of the side Ab key.  It did make my head spin a little trying to sort out which fingers to use. Hopefully I'll get another stab at it, I would like another couple of weeks to consolidate.  I have had some play throughs of the third movement of the Telemann Fantasia but have not done as much on this as I'd have liked.  My embouchure gave up on Monday before I could really get stuck in.

Orchestra last night was a night of two halves.  We spent the first half working on Sleeping Beauty.  This could definitely do with some sectional rehearsal because in places it frankly sounds pretty dreadful at the moment.  There are a number of places with repeated staccato semiquavers from the wind (clarinet, bassoon, oboe, cor anglais) which need to be precise and give support to the tune.  These are difficult to play well at the right volume -  and we don't play them well, or together, or in time with the rest of the orchestra and they are generally too loud.  Hopefully we can get it sorted before we have to perform it.  Having said that, the last movement is sounding really rather nice now.

The second half was spent looking at Night on Bare Mountain. This is probably, on paper at least, even more difficult -but somehow it seems easier to play. The fact that it is so loud and fast and almost aggressive makes it  possible to just launch yourself at it and see what happens.  Getting each note  in place isn't as important as  the overall gist and the attitude.  It seems to work.  This is really good fun to play and feels like it is coming together.