Technicalities

September 5, 2008 at 3:10 AM

Lesson night once again. This year it is an hour earlier, and I hit some pretty heavy traffic on the way to my teacher's studio. I made it *just* in time. (Note to self, leave earlier next week).

We started of with the technical exercises; scales, etudes, finger exercises. Being that it was a warm evening, my hands got a little sweaty (as well as the rest of me). That did not help much with intonation, and neither did the typical issue I have playing immediately after work. But - we are both used to that warm-up time lag now. The focus of my technical work this week was keeping the fingers of my left hand curved. That means NOT keeping my arm stationary, but moving around as I change strings. Now if my pinky can ever get to a curved position... :::sigh:::: large viola, small hands.

We worked on the Brahms Sonata, the piece that I'll be focusing on for several months. There are a couple of measures that seem simple enough at a first glance - that is until you try to get your left hand to play them. Add on top of that the expressive shifting my teacher wants me to start doing more of, and well, the piece starts turning into a series of scale exercises, moving from one to another measure after measure, phrase after phrase, with a few accident(al)s thrown in for good measure (pun intended).

The choice of technical work by my teacher was timely - as always.

From Paul Grant
Posted on September 5, 2008 at 10:47 PM

I love the Brahms viola sonatas! You inspired me to pick one up last night and sightread through it.

Are you doing the Eb major or the f minor sonata?

From Mendy Smith
Posted on September 6, 2008 at 5:14 AM

Op. 120 No. 2

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