Category Archives: Cello

Pop Quiz

What do these things have in common?

‘Marriage of Figaro’ overture (what do you mean you want me to play two bars with a single upbow?)
Symphony no. 3, also by Mozart
Symphony no. 32, yet more Mozart

Selections from South Pacific

And to come, I am told, there are still:

Selections from My Fair Lady
Selections from The Sound of Music

If you guessed ‘the Canada Day concert programme’ you’re right.

I am not a huge fan of musical medleys. They tend to not be well-arranged, schmaltzy, and all over the map rhythm- and key signature-wise. Add in the fact that I have actually never seen South Pacific and, well, yeah. (Okay, I know ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘Bali H’ai’, and am I the only person who thinks of Led Zepplin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ when I hear the latter?) But the Canada Day concerts are all about making the masses happy with cheerful and recognisable music, so musical medleys we will play.

Also, our principal cellist had to tell us today that she wouldn’t be in town for the concert, making it the first Canada Day concert she’ll miss. Thank the gods she’s got two potential subs lined up, because none of us could pull it off without someone solid in her chair. I will miss her terribly.

Somewhat related: I sight-read very well at the beginning of the night (and in E flat major!) but those skills degraded over the course of the rehearsal until I was just keeping up in the overture and the South Pacific medley.

I was really, really hoping for some Beethoven.

I need to go to sleep. I am very awake.

Dee Dee Dee…

Best tyop so far today: you may wish to crate a separate shrine for this purpose. Can’t let those shrines run free, oh no. Keep ’em contained. No inter-shrine contact!

I have ZERO focus today. Work is getting done, though. If all goes well I may nail Chapter Five in the file today, and part of Chapter Six as well. I spent a large part of the morning wrestling with how to sequence Chapter Six. I keep rearranging the sections and so far no order makes more sense than any other. Argh.

I’m listening to a broadcast of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and although I’ve played it I don’t have much memory of it other than visual and atmospheric impressions. Usually when I’ve played something I remember the musical line really well. This one, not. Odd.

I miss Vanilla Coke. Hmm. I do have a finger of vanilla schnaaps left and Coke in which to mix it…

ETA @ 3:40: Chapter Five is finished! The file stands at page 106 (AKA page 118 in the hard copy). Now for the puzzle that is Chapter Six…

Lunch Break

I just cut an entire six pages because they didn’t fit. I’d feel better about it if I hadn’t spent hours writing them months ago in the first place, and a good forty minutes rewriting them in the cafe on Monday.

I didn’t go to work in the cafe after all this morning. Even the smallest movement is painful, and I’m in a no-people frame of mind. Dissolving into tears in the car after dropping the boy off was a marked sign that editing in a public place wasn’t going to work. So I came home, which was depressing in itself. I’m now halfway through the printout of the manuscript, and on page 40 of the file. The latter is a rather unreliable guide to progress, as it no longer matches the pagination of the printout (which makes for some puzzled flipping when my scribbles on page Z say to ‘move to page X’ and page X of the file is now Z+9).

It’s been a frustrating morning, on top of the already low mood.

Songs and Poems for Solo Cello

But this was in the parcel waiting for me at the post office, one of the two I missed on Monday when I was working in the cafe. And I’m kind of glad the upstairs neighbours aren’t home because I’m listening to it at a rather loud volume. It’s both beautiful and depressing. I can hear every shift Sutter makes and the movements of her bow arm (not because of poor recording or shoddy technique, but because of her phrasing and the stunning acoustics of the church in which it was recorded), and I wish I could play like that.

I’m going to go heat up a piece of last night’s lasagna and then come back and slog some more.

Hello World…

… I am not dead, just busy. (And in a curious amount of pain, for some reason. It’s fine as long as I don’t move.)

The concert was lovely. As I expected I enjoyed myself immensely for the first half and played very well, with the overture standing out as particularly good. As I’d feared, though, I began wilting in the symphony. I aced and loved the first movement but the second movement was faster than usual, which was fine up till the fugue-type bit started by the cellos. As we came up to it I realized that there was no way I could do it at that speed so I just hung on and did what I could. Which wasn’t much, really, and it depressed me despite knowing that it was the speed and not my ability. The mood clung to me and I just couldn’t enjoy the scherzo and trio much, but I was bound and determined to enjoy the fourth movement, and I did, but only because I insisted on it.

Thank you to HRH, Ceri, Scott, Marc M, Marc L, Mel, Amanda, and Val for sharing the evening with us. I think the audience was at about sixty percent capacity, although it really seemed like more when everyone congregated in the hall for cider and cookies at intermission. I can’t even estimate actual numbers.

Now we have two weeks off. This may not be a bad thing, as I suspect the pain at the base of my spine is from sitting in the new chairs three times in four days.

I took my manuscript printout with me when I dropped the boy off at the caregiver’s yesterday, and betook myself to the cafe in which I used to write before we moved. I got myself a decaf latte and a brownie, then sat and worked on editing the manuscript for two hours. It was good to be out, in a silver of sun that slowly moved from my papers to myself, away from the distractions of the internet, my bookshelves, and the chores in the kitchen. I slashed and rewrote Chapter Three and some of Four, then came home and began transferring last week’s edits to the file. Chapter One and Two are mostly done now, with just one or two places I’ve marked to polish or check a fact. I think I’ll be doing the cafe thing again on Wednesday, except I may try a different location because the music was loud and not very conducive to my mood. Trying to listen to my MP3 player above the cafe’s music was worse, though. When I used to go there the staff was friendlier, and they played jazz.

It was so beautiful yesterday that I had the back door open while I was making dinner. Sparky and I were watching blackbirds from the back deck when we had a visit from a rather large plump squirrel. It climbed up the stairs and inched its way on to the deck looking at us expectantly, and I had visions of the thing turning ugly when I informed it that we were not serving. I also hoped that none of the cats were sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, or they’d be outside like a shot. Sparky spent a lot of time between the car and the front door bending over to see the quarter-inch tall first signs of all the bulbs we planted last fall, poking at them and saying with great excitement that he could see the flowers growing. And we saw a robin, which was lovely too.

Spring is good. And it’s not going to take as long for all the snow to melt as we’d expected, because the temperature has radically readjusted and we’re looking at sun all week (Thirteen degrees today and Thursday! Sixteen degrees tomorrow!) with periodic clouds and scattered showers before light rain all weekend. The middle of the back yard is already mud and dead grass. The sun is doing wonders for my outlook.

Sparky and I are home together today and having a lovely time so far.

Concert!

I’m really looking forward to the concert tonight. Not because I think I will be brilliant — I will be passable, making lots of stupid mistakes and not-quite-getting the harder passages I’ve been working on for months — but because I’m looking forward to playing this music. I love the Delibes dance suite, and I’d never have heard the Gounod symphony if it hadn’t been put on this program; they’re both fun to play. And I will see friends tonight, which is always wonderful too, especially these days when we see so little of one another.

And I’m proud of how well I’ve been handling orchestra in the wake of the fibro diagnosis. I’ve been cutting myself a lot more slack about low energy, clumsy fingers and hand movements, and not being able to pull off what I want to be pulling off. I try, and I get some of it; if I don’t, well, I didn’t, and it isn’t the end of the world. It’s more than mildly ironic that in the past when I felt I wasn’t getting it I’d try harder, which would just make things worse. Now I understand why.

Dress rehearsal went well enough. The seating arrangement has been slightly altered in hopes of improving how easily the sections could hear one another. It worked for me; I don’t know about the other sections. Having the winds behind where the violas usually sit meant I could really hear their lines and cues. The celli and first violins have been pushed back and angled more, too. I can see the conductor a lot more clearly as a result. When we were wrapping up the conductor told us it sounds good, and sounds even better from further away. We were all a bit punchy by that point, and it was very amusing to imagine a sign posted to the effect of In order to obtain the most value for your money, please sit as far away from the orchestra as possible.

If you’re just tuning in, or need the reminder:

The Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra presents their Spring 2008 concert tonight, with the theme of French composers and dance music. The programme features:

Overture to The Caliph of Baghdad by Boieldieu
Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel
Chanson et aires de danse dans le style ancien from Le roi s’amuse by Delibes
Pavane, op. 50 by Fauré
Symphony no. 1 by Gounod

The concert takes place on Saturday April 5, 2008 at 19h30, and will be presented at Cedar Park United Church located at 204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC (corner St. John’s Blvd). Admission is $10, children under 18 attend free of charge.

The church is easily reached via public transport by taking the 211 bus west from Lionel-Groulx metro, disembarking at St. John’s blvd, and walking south to Lakeview (the first street south of autoroute 20). By car, take St. John’s Blvd south from either autoroute 40 or 20 and turn right (west) on Lakeview. The church is about three houses along on the south side of the street. There’s a parking lot on the west side. Here’s a map to help you find your way.

Five Things

1. Jteethy has a job! Woo-hoo!

2. Sun! Sun! The snow of yesterday is pretty much gone! (Only a metre or so of the winter stuff left to go now…)

3. A weekend that feels like a weekend so far, and will only get better with a visit from Ceri and Scott this afternoon, a flying visit with the inlaws while we get ready to go out and they start minding the boy, and then the concert tonight.

4. Fresh bread, Dijon mustard, fresh slices of grilled Angus roast beef, and Swiss cheese.

5. A really wonderful night of sleep after a decent dress rehearsal.

Morning Links

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.

We were hoping Sparky would sleep in, so HRH took the bus to work and I’ll be dropping the boy off with the caregiver. If I’d known he was going to wake up at his usual time I’d have told HRH to carry out the usual plan, and stayed in bed. But he was gone before the boy awoke.

Apart from that, here are two links, one amusing, one interesting:

The amusing: Princess Leia’s plea to Kenobi, cast as an e-mail scam:

[…] Our Bank Accounts both Here and Abroad are being Frozen by the Imperial Senate. Furthermore, we are Under Threat of Detention by the Grand Moff for Interrogation about my Father’s Assets and some Vital Documents.

By Virtue of our Position as Civil Servants and Members of the Royal House of Alderaan, we Cannot Regain this Money Under our own Names.

I have therefore been Delegated to look for an Overseas Partner into whose Account we would Transfer the sum of Twenty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand Galactic Standard Credits (26,400,000.00) for Safekeeping. Hence we are Sending you this Message in the Memory Systems of This R2 Unit. […]

The interesting: 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.