After every concert we put on, I want to come home and journal about how this was The Best Concert Ever! And what that says to me is that I (a) enjoy them, (b) feel confident about our capabilities, and (c) the concerts go really really well, (d) the presence of an audience adds that extra edge, and (e) the concerts are fun. And evidently the audiences agree with me, because they keep coming back.

Last night was excellent. I’ll be riding the high for quite some time.

For my part, I was concerned about my performance in the Beethoven. September and October were horribly busy months, where I couldn’t practice as I wanted to practice (which quickly became the way I needed to practice), and trying to catch up in November proved extremely difficult. I’m proud to say I pulled it off: I didn’t savage the really difficult bits, only twice fell apart and stopped playing altogether for a bar or two, and nailed some of the stuff that had been really stonewalling me. The entire orchestra melded into a seamless Beethoven-playing machine, and achieved some sort of para-Beethoven performance that even we didn’t anticipate. Not that we expected it to go badly; it’s just that we’d never played it quite like that before. Everything else on the programme went smoothly as well, but the Beethoven simply overshadowed it all.

Also, my debut as a triangle player was a triumph.

The house was about three-quarters full, which was very gratifying because there’s nothing worse for a performer than to look out into the audience and behold a sea of empty seats: it’s demoralizing. And in the end, three people who I hadn’t been expecting showed up as well as the three I knew would be there. Thank you t!, Jan, MLG, Jeff, Paze, and HRH; your presence meant a lot to me. (Plus you got to enjoy some really, really fine music.) And I appreciate all the well-wishes for our season opener left in form of journal comments and phone and e-mail messages from those who couldn’t make it, too.

And I discovered that having a dress rehearsal the morning of the concert date itself does dreadful things to my sense of time and the day’s schedule. I’m thankful that this was an exception to the rule.

Next up: the first section of the Messiah!