June 11, 2004 at 4:46 PM

Wednesday's violin lesson went really well overall. I could have played Lark Ascending better but I was pleased to have played it as well as I did. My teacher was quite pleased too!! She helped give me some things to work on to make it better which is good and there are still some things, rhythmically that I want to get more secure. That piece has so many rhythmic things that are incrediably easy to mess up. The Lark Ascending is so beautiful though, I really love it, and the challenge is a good one to have it ready to perform by the 28th. Let's just hope it won't be the "Lark Descending" as opposed to the "Lark Ascending".

I've been working through the Beethoven Sonata, opening movement (Op28 the Pastorale on piano) a lot in the past week. I'm performing it on Sunday and it's a long, hard piece. It's so great though! The parallel sections are incrediably hard to do well and to keep that inner voice quiet while bringing out the outer ones. I'm really excited and a bit nervous about performing it too. It'll be a good experience. I'm not the most familiar with performing on piano so it's always a bit nerve wracking. I had my piano lesson yesterday and we spent most of it on the Beethoven. My teacher gave me some more little things I can improve on, but overall these next 2 days are going to be getting everything down as solid as I possibly can for Sunday.

On CBC radio 2 on Wednesday they had an hour of the morning spent with Peter Oundjian. It was interesting to hear. One of the recordings and great violinists that Oundjian talked about was Oistrakh's Shostakovich 1 recording. They ended up airing the last movement of the Brahms violin concerto played by Oistrakh. I was at first really striken with just how slow it was, but it really was your typical, very solid, very big sounding, just plain amazing, Oistrakh. I'd like to hear the full concerto sometime!

Speaking of recordings, my Ysaye solo sonatas played by Kaler ar in!! I have to go and pick them up yet, but hopefully sometime this weekend if I'm in town or next week I can do that.

For this weekend's several recitals and performances my repertoire requirement has been upped again. I'm going to get an easy Wieniawski Mazurka I played a couple years ago up to snuff again to play at my piano recital. Luckily it's not a hard piece, and I don't think I have to perform it by memory, so I'll just work on it a bit both today and tomorrow and it should be fine for Sunday.

Last night, after my piano lesson, I had a rehearsal with all the little "Fiddlekids" who are playing on one of the Sunday recitals I'm involved with. It went pretty good! It should be fun to go and play with them. They are all so cute and it's so fun to see a small kids eyes widen when they realise that they are standing on a really big stage with a really big theatre and then there's and audience. After all the rehearsals were done, some of the kids stayed to run through their solo piece that they would be playing. It was a relatively small room, but there was a horribly out of tune piano and a small platform to stand on, so if you are younger, like the few kids were, you were able to at least get a bit of an idea as to what playing on a stage would be like. I helped my teacher cart some stands back up into her studio room and asked if I could run through my solo when all the kids were done. She hadn't heard me play the Ciaccona in a couple of months and I really wanted her to hear it before Sunday. So I got up there, one child who's probably about 8, and her mother stuck around while I played and by that time my Dad had come and so he sat and listened as well. I got up on the little platform and began to play. My first chord was quite atrocious so I stopped and took a breath and started with a good chord. It went alright I had a couple of little things, but I didn't bump strings hardly at all, my intonation was for the most part secure and I think I pulled off a convincing performance. My teacher talked to me for a bit afterwards and seemed really pleased with what I had done with the piece since she had last heard it and said to "just have fun with it. Enjoy the musicality and pyrotechnic's of the piece on Sunday." So I am happy and more comfortable and confident knowing she knows where I am at with the piece. She's said before that I make a lot of the technical fireworks in that piece look really easy and effortless and that people seem to just feel comfortable around me when I play.

So on that note. I should go and practice one of these great pieces I am going to be performing!

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June 11, 2004 at 4:46 PM

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