On to happier thoughts.<\/p>\n
I thought it would either be rather interesting or completely, mind-crushingly dull to chart my preparation, in all it\u2019s mundane quirkiness of a specific work or two this year.<\/p>\n
So, still moving a bit slow from the long trip to America, I\u2019ve begun to try to get back at music for a couple of hours a day. First up is a piece I\u2019m not doing until November, the Brahms Double Concerto, which I\u2019m playing with Suzanne in Boston.<\/p>\n
This will be the second time I\u2019ve played the Brahms- the last time was with a different violinist, though. However, it has been about 6 years, so the first thing I did was hack through the piece (no mean feat considering I hadn\u2019t played in a couple of weeks) to see how things were.<\/p>\n
Brahms is hard to play when you\u2019re well prepared and in good shape, and no more need be said of that first play through, except that my wife at least recognized the piece.<\/p>\n
After a cold beer and a little cry, I decided to strategize. I\u2019ve decided that this year, I\u2019m going to try to have the discipline to try and make my cello preparation more like my conducting preparation and my conducting preparation more like my cello preparation.<\/p>\n
This means that I want to do a lot more cello prep away from the instrument, and that I really want to learn all the scores as if I were conducting them- I\u2019m going to analyze, mark, dissect and bang through on the piano every Beethoven Quartet or Klein Trio as if I were going to conduct them from memory. I\u2019m hoping this will not only enrich my understanding of the pieces, but also help me feel more focused and centred when I play them by sharpening my generative hearing.<\/p>\n
With pieces I\u2019m conducting, I want to work on getting the music deeper into my body before rehearsals. So much of my work is under physically disadvantageous situations- whether it is driving 3 hours and pulling up at the door five minutes before conducting a Schumann symphony or waking up after a short nap at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight. That kind of travel schedule means I tend to be even more vulnerable to the dangers of tightening up when the orchestra struggles a bit. I\u2019ve got a lot of tricks for managing that in rehearsals, but I also feel that finding ways of knowing how I want to get the sound of the piece in my arms and posture will help me deal with the bumps and bruises of travel and work.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, for once I haven\u2019t started learning the concerto a week before the concert, so there is some reason to hope that I\u2019ll actually finish some of this work. I\u2019ve tracked down a copy of the manuscript at the International Music Score Library,<\/a> and I\u2019ve ordered the new Urtext score<\/a>, which seemed a bit of an extravagance as I already own the perfectly useable Dover reprint of the old Complete Works edition. Still, I found the work I did with the manuscript and Urtext of the First Symphony last spring to be really helpful. Interesting, I\u2019m doing the Double six days before I do the Second Symphony, which will make for some interesting mental cross-fertilization.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, as I wait for the new score to arrive, I\u2019ve started in on the cello part. I\u2019m a firm believer in slow practice=fast progress, which makes my practice torture for neighbors, as nothing I do sounds much like music when I\u2019m practicing. Early on, it\u2019s a mixture of practicing in whole notes (practicing in whole notes wins jobs!), both to clear up intonation but more importantly helps to line up my sound production and balance. Then I do some \u201cpracticing at 40\u201d (that\u2019s 40 beats per minute on the metronome), gradually working up until I\u2019m just slightly under tempo but unhurried.<\/p>\n Parry Karp gave me the best practice advice I ever heard when I first met him (I was 15), and it\u2019s one of those things you keep learning what it really means as you get older- don\u2019t practice fear into your playing<\/strong>. At this age, that means being patient and letting the piece come to me, rather than racing to make it sound like something to soon. I had been practicing from the solo part (which has both the cello and violin lines on it) but today, I\u2019ve brought the orchestra score down and put it on the stand- makes for more page turns and a lack of continuity but it\u2019s a better way to learn the piece, with all the harmonies and orchestration right in front of you.<\/p>\n After about four days of this stuff, the good news is that I can now definitely tell that I\u2019ve played the piece before\u2026.<\/p>\n
\nThe other little practice trick I\u2019m doing a lot of is playing a lick, run or phrase just under tempo, but stopping on a different note each time as a fermata to check if I\u2019m arriving in balance and in tune- balance being more important than tuning at this point.<\/p>\n