October 2006

Carnegie Hall

October 29, 2006 19:04

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice. Very, very hard.

That's pretty applicable to my recent experiences. Two nights ago I had my Carnegie Hall debut! Well, my quartet did. From The Top made a 13-part TV series that will air on PBS in April, and the episodes are pretty much just like the radio show, except you get to see the performers obviously, and they were all taped at Carnegie Hall. My quartet was asked to play a quartet by a 17-year-old Navajo girl living on a reservation in Arizona. It's called Moon's Lullaby, and it was pretty short, but very beautiful.

Even though the performance was on Friday night, we drove up Wednesday morning because over those two days we had to attend rehearsals and such. In our free time we got to explore New York! We went to Times Square and went shopping and got a caricature of ourselves done on the street. It was a really fun vacation from school, and amazing to play in Carnegie Hall.

Some of the other kids on our show were an 11-year-old Korean pianist who was playing some amazingly technical piece, and a saxophone player from Kentucky. Also, an 18-year-old violinist, Charles Yang, and a 13-year-old cellist played the Dumky trio (one of my all-time favorites) with Christopher O'Riley, the host.

I'm playing the third movement of Wieniawski next weekend with a local orchestra, the Bucks County Symphony. We've had one rehearsal so far, which went swimmingly except for, the conductor wants me to the gypsy part really slowly, slower than any recording I've ever heard. The thing is, I don't think he really knows the piece though, so I feel like I'm right, but I don't want to be disrespectful. I've decided to compromise by keeping the tempo about the same but using a lot of rubato in that section.

To Be Con't....
--alice

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October 2006

Carnegie Hall

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