Friday, March 13, 2009

And another argh!

Well, tonight is supposed to be our "easy" concert - winners of the concerto competition play (usually) one movement of their piece and we do one orchestral piece. There are 7 winners this year and who would have thought they would all play hard stuff for the orchestra?!!! Actually that isn't true, only most of them are hard. Prokofiev Piano Conc #2 (hard), Ravel Tzaigne (or something like that) ppp high f# solo, Liszt Piano Concerto oboe solo 3x as fast as it should be (IMHO!), Stravinsky Rake's Progress (do you know this Patty?) Anne Somebody's aria - HUGE oboe/EH/bsn solo trio (oxymoron? no one else plays) for like, 20 bars!!!

And all this plus more, but the crowning horror (I say this meaning MY horror of playing it, not that the piece is horrible - that is yet TBD) Schwantner's new piece. We actually played it through last night, but I wish we had another month (!) to work on it. There are so many things about this piece that aren't quite lining up (our fault). The huge oboe solo mvt (3) I have spent hours on with the metronome, and it is really pi$$ing me off that when the other winds come in (joining me), they are playing consistantly wrong rhythms! I can totally understand playing it wrong, because it is quite complicated and looks very scary, but it is quite repetitive. So if they just played it like I did (by myself for say 8 bars, then they join in on the same thing for 20 bars)....Makes me mad. Maybe it will be better tonight - we have only had 2 chances to play that mvt.

The first mvt is probably the most scary - TONS of meter changes, basically every bar. It is fast, and the WWs have these swoopy parts that I think we are all just getting the "shape" of the swoops, not the actual notes (which are more or less 12-tone).

Sorry to rant, but nerve-wracking and my reeds are sucky. As always it seems! I keep getting one and then the weather (or the gods of bad luck) changes and it is terrible. Anyway, I'm sure I will feel better about it after tonight! Next concert we are doing Mozart Requiem, so a nice break for me. Also Beethoven 5 which will be great. I'm doing some solo stuff for church and a little recital thing, but my next big thing will be playing euphonium for Easter!

1 comment:

Patty said...

I've played the opera, Jill. I really love it, but it did require some hard practice! Anne Truelove's aria ... was it "No Word from Tom"? One of my faves ... but I don't remember our parts at all, so maybe not.

I've heard that the Schwantner piece is a bear of a work; can't remember where I read about it, besides your blog, but I know it was online somewhere.