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March 21, 2005 at 4:16 PM

We're on spring break! Yay! That means I get to sleep till 10.
A couple of days ago, I got a letter from Encore, saying I got in. We're still waiting to hear about scholarship, though, and from the Perlman people...which is kind of longshot but I have my fingers crossed, which makes it hard to type. And practice.

Last Tuesday we went to Tony's memorial concert, which was at the Queen Street branch of Settlement. The audience was mostly his colleagues, plus a few students. Mads played her Bruch Romance, which was beautiful. She played right after his standpartner from the Harrisburg Symphony was making his eulogy on the stage and weeping, so it was tough for her to get up there and do it. But she did. His teacher from Peabody, Richard Field, played a solo and gave a beautiful speech. Tony's wife Marka, and five of his colleagues played a Mournful Pavane by Alexander Tchaikovski (is he a descendant of Peter Ilych? It was spelled with an 'i' in the program, but I've seen Peter Ilych Tchaikovski before, so...) which was really nice, and at the end, they played a 2003 recording of Tony and a percussionist called Grand Duo for Viola and Percussion, forget who it was by. It was very powerful, listening to the piece and looking at the empty stage with the solitary music stand. Everyone was very moved. Afterwards we went to a reception at David Yang's house (on the way we encountered a fight between three teenage boys over a basketball trophy).

On Friday I did my yearly playing for the Settlement branch directors & board members, so I could continue getting my scholarship. It went really well, and afterwards my teacher said that it was the most musical he ever heard me play that piece. He then told me that he had put Truffle, his 21-year-old cat, to sleep that morning. He had Truffle since she was a kitten and all the time I had studied with him. But she was obviously sick and had been so for some time. It was a shame because he really loved her. But as far as life spans for cats go, she was pretty old!

After that, Mads, I, and the Tabby twins did our quartet audition. We played the 1 and 6 mvts of the Walker piece, and the committee seemed to really enjoy it, they chuckled at all the right places, and laughed at the end. The reason for this audition was we hope to be picked to play on the Settlement Annual Concert, which we did last year.

The Zig(eunerweisen) is going pretty well. I'm working a lot on the Allegro. We're afraid that the harmonics just aren't going to come out on the 3/4 size, so we might cut them for the master class. But I'm still trying.
--Alice