Category Archives: Music

Work At Last

To everyone who has left comments or sent me private emails assuring me that I Did Not Suck: thank you, but I wasn’t worried that I did. And upon rereading my post I have reassured myself that no, that’s not what I said; I expressed my disappointment with my experience. I just didn’t enjoy myself. I’m not enjoying much these days.

The first part of the project finally arrived yesterday, almost a full two weeks late. And sure enough, they want it back two weeks earlier that the original timeframe defined. On top of that this project functions on a monthly billing schedule, which means I’m not going to see money until mid-August. After blocking off the last third of June and deciding against bidding for another job, this makes me very, very cranky. I have bills, and my savings are dangerously low. Also: monthly? That implies working for more than one month, which I highly doubt is the case here. The original timeline was for a four-week delivery, and with things being late, voila, we are already behind (as is usual in this industry, I understand). I did a bit of detective work last night and located the product for which I am doing this editing, and it’s scheduled for release this fall. I can understand the rush caused by the late delivery of the translation, but it irritates me that my schedule and finances are negatively impacted by it.

Post-Concert Thoughts

A huge thanks to everyone who made it out to the concert last night. There were stalwart supporters there as well as unexpected faces. It was wonderful to see you all, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. It was great to have my five-year-old goddaughter there, pepped up on gummy worms and thoroughly excited about the night. “I get to hear Autumn play her cello — then there will be fireworks!” she was heard to exclaim. It’s nice to be ranked up there with the pyrotechnics. She came racing up to give me a flying hug when we were done, and I asked her if she liked the music. “I liked it, but I liked yours the best!” she told me. (Because, you know, the five-year-old ears of a godchild can pick your line out of everything else. It’s part of the godparent magic and mystique.)

As is becoming more and more common in concerts, time flowed away from me as we played: I closed the Water Music suite (hereafter to be referred to as the Linen Chest suite) to see the music of the Les Miz medley and thought, Oh, are we already at the end? I spent most of that time trying to focus. The cello zone was unattainable last night. Every once in a while I managed to achieve the headspace of ‘Hey, this is kind of pretty’, which was always immediately followed by ‘Oh, damn; so much for that’. There are concerts that I walk out of feeling fabulous. This was not one of them. Which is not to say the concert went badly — apart from two timing/wrong entry errors, it went well — or that I played abysmally — I was adequate (not as on as I’d have liked but that came from not being able to focus). I just didn’t enjoy myself very much. I kept trying to be in the moment, and simply couldn’t. (Although sure enough, I found myself using different fingering on the fly last night and consequently fumbled.)

There are three aspects of a concert experience, I realised as I discussed it with friends afterwards. My personal experience (or any individual player’s experience); the orchestra’s experience as a unit; and the audience’s experience. (There’s probably a separate conductor’s experience too, now that I think about it.) What I experience and feel about my performance is not necessarily the orchestra’s overall experience, and certainly does not signal or predicate the audience’s experience. And that’s important. I’m glad I can leave a concert that I felt neutral about and hear that audience members enjoyed themselves.

People gave us a standing ovation before we started. That was nice. Unnecessary and perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic (or optimistic, I’m not certain), but nice.

This will certainly go down in my history as the coldest Canada Day concert ever. I shivered throughout the overture and the Mozartiana, even despite wearing stockings and shoes and heavier black clothes instead of the linen sheath and sandals that comprise my usual Canada Day concert garb. Attendance to the festivities in general seemed lower than usual, perhaps due to the cooler temperatures and the brief cloudburst that had hit late in the afternoon.

The fireworks were great, even though they were oddly paced (such is the risk with live pyrotechnic displays). We hung around at the end and were treated to a post-script display of all the ones that failed to go off in the original firing. It was clear that some of them were designed to be a backdrop to the finale. I saw styles of fireworks I’d never seen before, too, which was exciting, and as Karine says, made me feel like a kid again.

Well, there. That’s the end of this orchestral season, my sixth with this group. I wish I could have personally ended it on a better note (no pun intended — my intonation on that final A flat was excellent). It’s hard to walk away from something that climactic feeling flat.

Noooooo!

We’re halfway through Pan’s Labyrinth. The DVD suddenly started degrading fifteen minutes ago, and now it hangs and jumps chapters.

HRH is making an emergency run to Blockbuster, because there’s no way you can leave a film like this half-watched.

Dress rehearsal today left me kind of glum and in that “why do I bother” headspace. I had to ask my section principal if my intonation had sucked as much as I thought it had, because I spent the entire two and a half hours feeling as if I was struggling to blend. When I can’t grab onto the proper tuning I end up skating all over the place, unable to settle down and be focused enough to play with the music instead of against it. She (lovely woman!) said that she hadn’t noticed anything, and I believe her; she’s one who would absolutely point out something wrong. I made her promise to tell me if ever I did anything wonky anyhow. The brass sounded almost too bright to my ears today, and it felt as if their sound waves and the string waves were fighting against one another. I couldn’t settle into the string flow properly and fought against those crashing waves all morning, missing entrances, shifts, easy fingerings, and rhythm stuff. On the up side I came home really wanting to play cello all afternoon to make it all better and to remind myself that the instrument can sound pretty, but instead Liam and I went for a walk, played on the slide at the park for half an hour (it got to the point where I just stayed up in the fort part and let Liam slide down, run around the structure, climb up the stairs on the other side, run past me, grab the horizontal bar set above the slide to swing out and slide down again all on his own, chatting with him as he narrated his actions excitedly) then we played in our backyard for ages because it was such a lovely day.

HRH just pulled up. Off to finish the movie!

Slight Change of Plans

The two Tchaikovsky pieces will not, in fact, be on our programme for Canada Day. The soloist has been grounded by his doctors until an emergency triple bypass has been performed.

So, y’know, if you were fortunate enough to hear him do a lovely job on the Beethoven violin concerto a year or so back with us (or even if you didn’t), keep him in your thoughts, please.

We will be presenting the Water Music suite we played at our last concert in lieu of the Tchaikovsky. I will be digging out the mp3s and listening to them in moments. Let’s hope I remember how to do the bourree and the subsequent attacca into the hornpipe between now and the dress rehearsal tomorrow.

EDIT: Er, evidently my brain was flashing back to June 2005 when I had a baby and subsequently missed playing bunch of Tchaikovsky in the 2005 Canada Day concert, including a couple of pieces with violin solo performed by this same soloist. For this concert we’ll be dropping the Tchaikovsky ‘Meditation’ of course, but not the ‘Mozartiana’. The other piece we’ll be dropping is the Kreisler.

Concert Countdown

Excellent, excellent rehearsal last night, despite my apparent inability to approximate correct intonation, and the sudden feeling that I’d never seen the symphony before in my life (this is particularly unnerving as I’ve played it previously in concert, as well as working on it these past three months). “Well,” the conductor said to me, “at least it’s… fresh.” He has a quirky sense of humour that I enjoy. I keep forgetting to record this: a few weeks ago we had a string-only rehearsal, and at one point we all sat there counting bars as he conducted a winds-only passage in silence. “This part was written by John Cage,” he said almost under his breath before we came in precisely where we were supposed to. I might have been the only person to hear him, or maybe I’m just the only one who found it funny.

This concert is, as usual, going to rock. And the weather isn’t going to be horrendous: at the moment Sunday looks like around 20 degrees and overcast. Let’s hear it for concerts at which no one melts! (Miss the announcement? Check back to this entry for all the details.)

Things I must drill into my head: I must not spontaneously decide to try a new fingering in the middle of performance. No, no, no. No matter how good an idea it seems at the time. Not that I think this sort of thing through; sometimes I just find myself with my hand on a different part of the fingerboard and I freeze with no idea how to get to the next note, and then three bars have gone by and where are we now, and being in fourth position would explain why when I played a 3 it didn’t sound like a 3 in first does, and how long was I playing in fourth position anyway? (And again I express my amazement — fourth? Fifth, okay, I could understand — but fourth?)

Tomorrow I sit down with my coloured markers and underline dynamic markings that I miss, write in easy fingerings and shifts that I always mess up (and the hard ones too), and highlight nasty key changes (the Les Miz medley is going to look like a bloody rainbow).

Rehearsal was the high point of two very bad days. I usually come home from rehearsal mildly frustrated with my inability to pull off things I know I can do, but I came home in a really positive mood last night that was extremely welcome after the day. And then I didn’t sleep (probably because of the bad day; I read half of Gaudy Night waiting to be tired). Liam didn’t sleep well either so today both of us were off, and he didn’t nap at all today. When this happens to the kid who regularly sleeps between two and two and a half hours, it’s a hugely bad thing. We went to the Chapters in Pointe-Claire for an hour or so where he played with the Thomas the Tank Engine table in the kids’ section, and I bought a book he pointed out to me while wandering about ( “Cello! Cello!”), called The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop by John Marchese. Which is what I’m off right now to read in bed with a glass of white wine and a square of Ghiradelli chocolate with caramel filling, because life has sucked lately and I deserve it.

Concert Announcement!

July 1 is coming up, which means that the annual Canada Day concert presented by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra is also nigh!

On July 1 the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will be giving a free (yes, free!) concert as part of the overall Canada Day celebrations in conjunction with Pointe-Claire Village. We do this every year, and it’s always terrific fun.

This year’s programme includes:

Overture to La clemenza di Tito, by Mozart
Praeludium und Allegro, by Fritz Kreisler
Theme and variations from Suite no. 4 “Mozartiana”, by Tchaikovsky
Souvenir d’un lieu chere: Meditation, by Tchaikovsky
Selections from Les Miserables, by Claude-Michel Schönberg
Symphony no. 31, by Mozart

The concert begins at 20h00. As always, this concert is being held at St Joachim Church in Pointe-Claire Village, below Lakeshore Road right on the waterfront. The 211 bus from Lionel-Groulx metro drops you right at the corner of Sainte-Anne and Lakeshore, and you just walk a block and a half down Sainte-Anne to the lake and the church. Here’s a map to give you a general idea. I usually encourage those facing public transport to get together and coax a vehicle-enabled friend along by offering to buy them an ice cream or something. It works nicely, and it’s fun to go with a group. And hey, you can’t beat the price. Be aware that if you’re driving, parking will be at a premium because of the whole Canada Day festivities thing going on. Give yourself extra time to find a parking place and walk to the church, which will be packed with people.

Free classical music! Soul-enriching culture! And as an enticing bonus, the fireworks are scheduled for ten PM, right after we finish, and the church steps are a glorious spot from which to watch them.

Write it on your calendar, tell all your friends! The more the merrier!

Home Again

We’re home, we’re alive, the cats are alive, all must be well.

It wasn’t exactly a relaxing weekend, but it was an important one. Liam slept dreadfully over the weekend, as did we. The drive home was awful thanks to that lack of sleep and the unyielding sun and humidity. We took Liam to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum on Father’s Day to see the planes fly and taxi around (who are we kidding, it was so we could see the Avro Lanc flying again — and fly it did without incident, unlike the last time I saw it out) which he absolutely adored; much more exciting than walking through the hangar looking at the parked aircraft. He caught ten minutes of sleep in the car then refused lunch and a real nap. Then his fifteen-month-old cousin (a useful catch-all term for the daughter of my own cousin) came over and they played together, providing several opportunities for laughter and photos. It was such a great afternoon, the lack of sleep and food aside. And it meant a lot to all of us for him to finally meet his great-grandmother.

As soon as we got home he was completely back on schedule — food, naps, bedtimes and wake-up times. Yesterday was a quiet snuggly day with books and movies, and today he’s off at daycare so I can get some more writing done before the next contract lands on my desk, as it’s scheduled to sometime before the end of the week.

I’m not feeling terribly communicative these days; it might have something to do with the huge pile of stuff that needs to get done and the lack of time in which to do it (or the computer programs that keep unhelpfully crashing, which are delaying some of the tasks). Nor did the Bell technician accidentally terminating my phone line this morning while fixing the downstairs tenant’s line help (then leaving for another job before coming back to fix it), or the refusal of my computer/modem/router/ISP to get back in harness when the line was restored. It made my scheduled research difficult, to say the least. So I did laundry instead.

Other than that, life in general and things are kind of there. And it’s orchestra tonight; only a week and a half till the concert on July 1.