{"id":500,"date":"2007-11-24T10:31:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T10:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2007\/11\/24\/codas-and-transitions\/"},"modified":"2007-11-24T10:31:18","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T10:31:18","slug":"codas-and-transitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2007\/11\/24\/codas-and-transitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Codas and transitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a reminder to our friends in South Wales and the Marches that tonight is the HSO concert with Suzanne playing the Mendelssohn<\/a>. Also on the program is Mozart\u2019s Symphony No. 34 and Schubert\u2019s Fourth Symphony, one sunny one tragic, one C major, one C minor. This being a Ken concert, you can guess which one I\u2019m ending with!\u00a0:)<\/p>\n

It was a busy, exhausting trip to American and a long, unpleasant journey back (let\u2019s just say British Airways and First Great Western Railways are not on my \u201chighly recommended\u201d list this week. For some reason, perhaps the fact that they dumped us all off the train in the middle of nowhere with no alternate travel so they could turn the train around to London to start the next trip on time, every time I think of First Great Western I hear a long string of profanity and words like \u201cscum\u201d in my head), so I\u2019ve been living this week under the pleasant delusion that I\u2019m not really very busy now and can take a few days to relax and cook turkey\u00a0 after the demands of the last two weeks, but that is not, strictly speaking, true. Sadly (well, not that sadly), this is one of those times that I have to conduct 3 completely different programs in the coming 5 days, and four over the next 18 days. It is times like this that I\u2019m really glad I have that long repertoire list you can see on my website- I wouldn\u2019t want to be learning everything from scratch.<\/p>\n

Once that rush is done, it\u2019s on to a nice holiday break, which is really just a shift in professional priorities. I\u2019ve got a lot of music on the second half of the season to learn, some of it very challenging (go Xenakis), and once things pick up in January, I\u2019ll have precious little time to study for the rest of the spring. There is also a fair amount of planning work for next season that needs to happen around that time- setting rehearsal schedules and concert repertoire for all the different groups.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to using part of that time to try some new projects for the blog and also hopefully beginning a new radio project- some interesting, and hopefully FUN, podcasts are in the works. Watch this space. I\u2019ve been working for weeks, even months, to find a style and a voice that works in a studio format. We\u2019re close, and hopefully episode one of the new series will be out very soon.<\/p>\n

There are some huge and exciting new things coming next season- concerts and recordings that will be more high profile than most, if not all, of what I\u2019ve done to date. Change is in the air, and change is coming to Vftp headquarters (note the last sentence of Suzanne\u2019s bio<\/a>). There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in a life, and with the coming of the new, one has to also make choices to say goodbye to some of the old. As anyone who has followed my schedule the last couple of years knows, I\u2019ve been pretty voracious in trying to learn and do the widest range of repertoire possible, regardless of the travel demands. I feel like I\u2019m now coming to a time when I have to get one with the work that is most important to me at the standard that I\u2019ve always wanted to be doing it. I need to find more time for planning, writing, organizing, studying, practicing (there\u2019s either going to be way more and more fun cello stuff in the coming decade or none!) and all that stuff, so now is the time to think about how I do that.<\/p>\n

Well, not now\u2026. 18 days from now\u2026.<\/p>\n

KW\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n