Category Archives: Music

Concert Recap Etcetera

First and foremost, a heartfelt thank you goes out to the nine people who made it out to my concert last night. I’m sure it was wonderful. All reports I’ve had have been to that effect, so I’ll trust them. I don’t remember much of it myself, being under the influence of a double-dose of cold medication. I do remember being very pleased with my expression in general and with my intonation in a couple of tricky places, and every once in a while doing the “Are we here already?” sort of thing. I received a couple of very nice compliments, both from inside the section and from the audience, so I will trust those as well. My section leader is very encouraging and supportive of me, and I learn so much just from sitting next to her. I wish I had more time to properly devote to music, and to take lessons from her.

HRH only got to the concert just before intermission, as Liam was very irritable and fought going to bed more than he usually does. Liam has been rather cranky in general and a challenging handful over the past couple of days because of his cold. (I seem to have the worse cold, which is just fine; I’d rather it be me than the boy.) Arriving late meant that HRH missed the Boyce symphony (very pleasant and my intonation was much better in it than it has been over the past week — why it previously suffered I have no idea, because it’s dead easy to play. Perhaps because it was the first thing we played in this week’s rehearsals, and so it was like a warm-up for my fingers and brain?) as well as the Vivaldi double violin concerto plus most of the Water Music suite. Fortunately he caught the Haydn symphony, which was nice and tight and relatively gaffe-free, and had a great impact.

When we walked out of the church, the sky was very clear and the stars and moon were so incredibly bright. I was out four nights last week for various music rehearsals and meetings, and every night it’s been the same. Lovely.

I’ve been up to my ears in contract work the past couple of days, very mind-twisty as I work out what the client wants from his abstract notes and rewrite/expand upon them. It’s always an interesting challenge working in this client’s projects. I have to finish it up today during the boy’s nap and tonight after he goes to bed, as I begin the full-time on-site contract tomorrow.

We have finally opened the last box of the tissues left from the bulk pack we bought at Costco last fall. Liam and I will go out today to get more, along with a new cell phone for me and various other little things. It’s the Cancer Society’s daffodil weekend, so we’ll certainly buy some of those as well. Hurrah, daffodils! Our bulbs are up a good four or five inches along the south side of the house; it won’t be long before they’re real flowers themselves.

Music, Consultants, and Colds

The sun, the sun! I’ve been greedily soaking it up for the past couple of days.

We had our final regular rehearsal before the spring concert last night, actually in the church where we’ll be playing. (Due to scheduling issues our dress rehearsal will be elsewhere.) It took almost half the rehearsal to accustom ourselves to the very different sound of the room. It’s hard to hear the other sections when everyone is playing, and the sound is somewhat muffled and oddly amplified. Not in a bad way; there were times where we sounded like we were an ensemble twice as big as we truly are, for example. As usual, it took me a whole movement to sort through the different sound to actually hear what I was playing. It’s going to be a lovely concert. (Concert! This Saturday night at 7:30! Cedar Park United Church in Pointe-Claire! Here are all the details!)

Yesterday I had my first face-to-face interview in over ten years. (Most of my jobs have been as a result of networking and being familiar with the employers beforehand, and my freelance work is based in telecommuting.) It went well; so well, in fact, that I am now an official consultant working on-site at one of the local megacorps. (For those familiar with HRH, it is, ironically enough, one of the places at which he’s been trying to land a job for a couple of years now. Taste that irony!) An inside referral secured me the interview, and the two-week contract (with possibility of renewal) seems tailor-made for me and my abilities and qualifications. The heads on the project are people who care deeply about the work, and for whom I developed quick respect during our interview. So naturally, now that I have the contract I am wibbling deep inside and worrying that I will let them down, as well as making the individual who referred me look bad. It would be really, really nice to not have to field my own inner critic every time I get a job. It sounds like I would have to actively work at not making the situation better, however, and I am nowhere near as wibbly as I was last night. This morning, I am Professional Editor Girl again.

The project sounds engaging and moderately challenging for me as well as interesting on a I’m-doing-a-good-thing level. Nothing like promoting reading comprehension while sorting words and — ahem — editing a dictionary. Seriously — how cool is that? I get to edit a dictionary. It’s like a dream come true, if I’d ever presumed to have this particular daydream. (Granted, the work will also be frustrating due to its nature, but still! Editing a dictionary!)

One of the curiosities of this contract is that I will be travelling elsewhere to work, instead of working in my home office with cats and tea and other comforts. I haven’t done this in five years. Public transport is now my friend again. It’s an hour of travel, broken into three twenty-minute chunks so I can actually settle down and read without worrying that I’ll miss my stop. I’m told they will provide everything I need, but really, I will have to burn a few data CDs’ worth of music, bring tea and a mug, a dictionary (because I have learned never to assume that any office has a reliable dictionary, if a dictionary at all, and sure I could use an online dictionary but I always suspect them of being Not Quite Real), my good headphones, notebooks, and so forth.

Eep. I will have keycards and such. And, I’m told, an office in which to work, which probably means a small unused conference room with a computer brought in. My lower back already hurts at the thought of office chairs.

Also, another small freelance contract landed in my in-box last night. It will have to be done in the evenings, now that I am an official nine-to-fiver for the next two weeks.

Liam and I have both developed colds. I thought it was the general spring allergy thing, but it is not.

That is all.

Eighty Years of Genius

Happy birthday, Rostropovich!

(Irony: I spelled the name this way, then noticed that the CBC headline had a ‘t’ in the last name. I double-checked to make sure, and yes, I’ve spelled it correctly, and they got it wrong. The URL has the correct spelling embedded in it, as does the body of the article. Gah. Does no one proof these things?)

Also: Who is this Slava guy, anyway?

Spring!

Today is the first full day of spring. We saw it in last night with one of the best spring equinox rituals in which I’ve ever had the pleasure to participate. (Yes, it even beat the Slinky rit four springs ago.) We had a great cross-section of people present, and the insightful focal exercise was fabulously designed and executed.

It is also JS Bach’s birthday. Happy birthday, JS!

And what better way to celebrate both the birth of JS and the first day of spring than by buying a replica sword based on the weapons of A Song of Ice and Fire?

Chamber Orchestra Concert Announcement!

Spring is just about here, and what better way to celebrate it than by enjoying some fine music?

On Saturday March 31 at 19h30, the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will present their spring concert at Cedar Park United Church in Pointe-Claire, QC. For your entertainment we have prepared the following programme:

Symphony no. 1 in B major – Boyce
Water Music suite (arr. Harty) – Handel
Concerto for 2 violins in A minor op.3 no.8 – Vivaldi
Symphony no. 99 in E flat major Hob. 1/99 – Haydn

Admission is $10 per person; entrance is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last approximately two hours.

The concert takes place at Cedar Park United Church at 204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC (corner St-John’s Blvd and Lakeview), one block south of autoroute 20. The 211 bus stops on the St-John’s overpass crossing the 20, and the church is an eight to ten minute walk south. While there are general public transport directions here for you, I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all. (Here’s a map for those of you who will be driving.)

If you were one of the lucky few who found seats (or tried!) at the standing-room-only performance of The Messiah this past Christmastide, it’s taking place in the same church. If you are a long-time supporter of my musical geekery, it’s also the same church in which I sang with the Christmas choir for four or five seasons about a dozen years ago (and wow, I didn’t realise it had been that long).

So circle the date on your calendar, book some friends, and enjoy a relaxing night out to celebrate the end of a long, hard winter and the lengthening days!

Apropos Of Not Much, AKA Distraction

My most recent wish-I-had thing is a five-string cello. It would be so, so very nice to be able to play low B (and lower!) without going to the trouble of downtuning and changing fingering.

Also, making part of your instrument from 250 year old reclaimed Pennsylvanian barn wood is just awesome. (Most of the instrument, actually, as this is an e-cello and thus consists mainly of fingerboard.)

I need to get some Philip Sheppard CDs, now. The samples on this page are beautiful. You can hear more at BMGZomba, a media-industry library of music clips for trailers and so forth, by searching “Philip Sheppard”. ‘Crystallised Beauty’ is being used for the ITV Jane Austen season, which is what led me to Sheppard’s other music.

Because Today Is All About One Step Forward, Many Steps Back

I nailed the damn bouree last night. Twice, in fact. Then I blundered in the hornpipe, which is attacca directly after it. Sigh.

Most of my Haydn is better. The trouble passages aren’t as troublesome, except when they are. (No, there’s actually meaning to that. I’ve improved to the point that the really hardest bits sound worse because everything around them isn’t a complete disaster.) And if I could just get past the damn mental block about playing A flats things would be very much better.

This has been a very trying day so far. The boy is off the rails, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and things just keep going wrong (the cats weren’t fed before HRH came to bed last night so they woke Liam and I up early, Liam didn’t want breakfast, he was dressed and put in the car without having a diaper change before we left so we had to turn around and come back, and so forth). I got to deposit my latest cheque from the publisher (and yay for that), but the grocery store was crowded beyond belief. Also, that grocery store has taken to locking the gate that allows wheelchairs and strollers through, because people were walking out with carts. This left another woman with a stroller and I standing outside in frustration. We flagged down a store employee as he left and he told us to go ask at the front desk. “We can’t get in to do that,” I said, “because we can’t leave our children out here.” He went back inside to fetch someone with a key, looking mildly annoyed because it wasn’t his job. Time to rethink the brilliant client-defeating strategy, people. If it had taken any longer I would have turned around and gone to another store, one that I know I can get into with a stroller, except I couldn’t face the thought of wrestling the boy in/out/into the car again.

It took the boy forty-five minutes to fall asleep for this afternoon’s nap. I’m ready to… I don’t know what I’m ready to do. I should try to squeeze work into the next hour, but I think I may practice instead, except that will frustrate me too. I wish I could just play something pretty without working at it. My computer refuses to recognise any blank CD I put into it to record a practice CD to listen to in the car, so that project I’ve been working on for the past hour is on hold too. It’s just that kind of day, you know? Nibbled to death by ducks.