Masterworks Letters VIII

Hi people! 

I’m going to try to write a decent post in the time I have available (namely, before the concert; intermission; and before bed).  There’s so much going on here it gets hard to find time to process things sometimes.  That’s what Sundays are for.  J

My performances went well.  For our program recital we were playing in a large (very live) hall on a Stienway D (concert grand).  It’s  a lovely piano and I didn’t feel like I had to fight it to get what I want.  Some of the Bostons in the studios and even the Steinway we use for class are really tough to get a singing treble sound from.   I’ve worked a lot on the Elegie in the past few weeks and it’s come a long way; I have a much more solid mental concept of it and have done some new work with interpretation.  The mental concept work helps a lot with knowing where you are (and what bass note comes next, if your mind decides to question that interesting fact in performance!) The recital performance was pretty solid (only one slip-up in the hard-to-memorize section) and it was a great warm-up for the Friday night performance before the dance program. 

The Friday event was in a  high school auditorium “across town” (ten minutes away).  The piano there is a Yamaha and it’s on the brighter side, but I liked it (and it was in tune, oh joy and delight!  We're knocking the practice pianos here out of tune).  Playing was a really neat experience.  I had been pretty nervous through the day—Shannon thinks it was obvious but I’m hoping that it was only obvious to her!!—but  I really relaxed and wasn’t worried about it towards the evening.  It was kind of an odd phenomenon, but very welcome.  :P  Thanks for praying.  The hall lights were completely out while I was playing; I think that the only light in there was the piano light.  I couldn’t see a thing aside from the piano (well, it’s not like I was looking at many other places either).  It was actually really neat.  I was able to work in a lot of things that I wanted to do with the music, and I was able to remember that I love it. 

Anyway.  That’s probably way more than most of you wanted to know.   In other news, the vocal intensive program finishes up this weekend (vocal and dance are three-week programs instead of four) and they gave a series of opera scenes recitals.   We made it to the one on Thursday evening.  It was packed out; the theatre is quite small.  It was so much fun.  I realized that listening to opera without being able to see it is kind of like listening to a movie instead of watching it.  Things make so much more sense when you can see the sets and the acting (and the projected English supertitles really help too). 

My favorite scene was one that they did from Rossini’s La Cenerentola (based on the Cinderella story).  It included the arrival of the king’s servant disguised as a beggar, checking out potential queens; the stepsisters try to chase him away but Cinderella feeds him.  Then a men’s chorus shows up and marches all over the stage, ending up in a line across the front: they sing an invitation to the ball while passing the actual paper invitation down the line to the girls.  The stepsisters manage to tear it in two between them; the chorus heaves a sigh of frustration and sings the whole thing over, passing a couple more invitations down the line.  It was hysterical.  The scene ended with the step –sisters throwing their wardrobe all over the room trying to find something to wear and finally flailing at each other with a couple of dresses, while Cinderella tries to pick up after them—and, mind you, they’re all singing at once in Italian.  :P

The food here is pretty good here (to change the subject rather abruptly…).  Lots of choices most of the time so one can find something good.  I’ve eaten a lot of salad, and I have gotten really tired of Italian dressing.  So today I tried honey-dijon; a very welcome change.  They serve pretty good cookies and some rather decent cakes for dessert—sugar is a good thing when one is very tired—and they have a lot of juice and coffee and things.   Sometimes I mix coffee and hot chocolate.  I also sometimes mix cranberry-raspberry and orange juice.   Mom sent me my thermos, and it’s so nice to have it here; I can bring tea when I do my morning practice, and get coffee at meals if that strikes my fancy.

I really could do with this four-hour-of-practice-per-day thing.  I also am liking the hour of practice I get before breakfast...dear family, beware.  :P  I’m still not getting through everything that I could, and I am finding that I really do love it.  Practicing Bach is addicting (working on the 6^th French Suite now).  I have been messing around with the Rachmaninov C# minor prelude just for kicks, and I’ve started the epic-ly gorgeous Chopin 4^th Ballade.  That thing is massive (17 pages) and I’m thinking it’ll be a good year-long project.  It’s hard to know exactly how to work on it because there’s just so much music to cover, and some of it is so hard.  One of my teachers, who just performed it for us, suggested working on the last 6 pages right away because they’re so difficult.  I’ve been plowing through them, hands separate, stopping a lot.  It’s insane.  Maybe this will take two years.  :P  I am also working on the last movement of the Beethoven Appassionata.  I realized once I got here that I still have a huge amount of work to do on it to have it solidly performance-ready, so I have been doing a lot of slow work and quite a bit of trying to get my left hand caught up to my right hand technically.  One of my teachers compared it to a younger child trying to catch up to an older child, and I realized that if I can’t play the left hand alone anywhere near tempo that’s kind of a problem—even if it does fine with the right hand along too.

And with that, I need to head to bed.  So glad that tomorrow’s Sunday—time to rest, write, think, and do things other than practice and class and running around campus for some reason or other.  Have a good restful day, people!

Rachel