Last week I was down with a bad cold (tested negative for COVID) for half of the week, and since then I've been playing catch-up on a whole bunch of non-music things, so my practice time suffered. (I also missed a UCDSO rehearsal last week.) I've been trying not to bring too much orchestra material into lessons, but this week I split time between Bach and fixing some bowing technique for off-the-string bow strokes. With the Bach, my intonation was all over the place, so my teacher has me practicing every movement with a drone on D (the suite I'm working on is in D minor) and listening for intervals. The bowing work is already starting to pay dividends in orchestras.

UCDSO performs tomorrow at noon -- or today, rather, seeing as it's after midnight now. Again, it's a short free concert to re-open the concert hall. And it's also being livestreamed on YouTube.

The stand partner I had at the first rehearsal hasn't been back; I'm not sure if she dropped out of the orchestra or is just sitting out one concert. That's a bit of a disappointment because I was hoping I'd be able to learn something from a viola performance major with small hands. (That said, my viola teacher also has small hands, so it's not a huge loss for me.) My new stand partner is an alum a few years older than me, which is nice from the perspective of sitting next to someone of similar age, but he's a tall guy with huge hands, so I'm using different fingerings from him and quietly envying his ability to stretch to notes and his ability to play a wide fourth-finger vibrato.

Meanwhile, with Camellia Symphony, work continues on the Sibelius symphony that both orchestras are playing in November. At this point I'm starting to get  quite comfortable playing every movement except the scherzo, which still needs a lot of slower practice to get the notes under my fingers. With all the other movements, the most important thing I'm focusing on at the moment is avoiding excessive pressure on the string when the music is marked fortissimo. I still have a tendency to overplay those moments in big, late Romantic repertoire and choke off the sound sometimes.

I might want to comment on the process of breaking down challenging orchestra rep at some point, but I should probably get to bed soon. Sibelius's 2nd Symphony has some good examples of scary-looking passages that become much less scary after noticing patterns or breaking down into smaller chunks.

I'm not sure what happened with my stand partner from the first rehearsal. I haven't seen her since, but her name was in the printed program today, so I assume she hasn't dropped out of the orchestra. I think some of the undergrads may have had schedule conflicts that kept them from playing this first concert (it's the only daytime concert all year). The stand partner I had for this concert is the one I've had for all rehearsals after the first one.

I was also quite struck by Judy Kang's vibrato choices when I first heard her in rehearsal this week. At the very beginning of the concerto she used a much narrower vibrato than most violinists I've heard, and gradually widened it. I thought it really seemed to help with the image of ice thawing.

It's been a while since I last updated, because I've been a little swamped (mostly non-music things), but I'm still hard at work on the music end.

Solo rep and lessons:

Given limited practice time, the repertoire focus is still just on Bach Cello Suite No. 2. Main points of emphasis are: using shorter bow strokes and bowing mainly from the wrist in the Courante, calming down the Sarabande (the imagery my teacher has in mind is skating on a frozen lake), and the tricky triple-stops in the Minuet. I'm also generally practicing everything in the piece with either an open string or a drone on D for intonation, because my hand has a tendency to drift sharp over time. I'm expecting to spend more time on solo rep starting in mid-November and maybe resume working on the Clarke at that time, because Camellia Symphony takes a break until January after our Nov. 6 concert and UCDSO does likewise after Nov. 20.

As it is, the Bach is plenty to work on. Now that I have access to the UC Davis practice rooms, I'm especially noticing time limits. I was already busy to begin with, so it's not as if I didn't already have to limit my practice time, but practice rooms have to be reserved in advance for 1 or 2 hour blocks, and when I can't stretch out my practice time for even a few minutes, it's especially noticeable when I've spent 45 minutes working on 8 measures of music and don't have enough time to practice all the other things I planned to get to.

Camellia:

We have our concert next weekend! Sibelius is coming along nicely; rehearsing it in two orchestra helps me a lot. We've spent the bulk of our rehearsal time on it, though the Nielsen violin concerto is going to get much more time this week as the soloist will be in rehearsals. I finally bit the bullet and wrote a whole bunch of fingerings into my part for the Nielsen. One of the challenges is that Nielsen liked to break patterns unexpectedly and modulate at surprising times, which makes the music a lot of fun to listen to but also makes it easy to get tripped up. It’s made quite a bit more difficult by the small print in the parts we were given, so I’m doing everything possible to make sure I can read it quickly this week.

UCDSO:

I finally heard why my stand partner from the first rehearsal hasn’t been back – she just has too much on her plate this quarter and will be back in January. The viola section is definitely shorthanded for the fall concerts, though I hear that at least other violists (who auditioned back in September) are joining the orchestra in January when they can fit rehearsals into their schedules.

This past Thursday’s rehearsal was a sectional. One of the benefits of playing in a big state university’s orchestra is that, being an educational program, it spends real money on sectionals, with top-notch professional musicians coaching each section of the orchestra. We got a lot of work done on the rhythms and unusual intervals in Tabuh-Tabuhan, as well as some passages in the Sibelius. (That said, I can’t use most of the fingerings our sectional coach suggested, which assume larger hands than mine.)

With a small viola section, there have been some unconventional revisions made to how we’re dividing up our divisi in 3 passages: I’ve been moved from sharing the top line (we were dividing by chair) to being alone on the bottom line of all of them, to take advantage of my Tertis-pattern viola and its cannon of a C string.

There's now a recording online of the Wantenaar piece we're working on; the Netherlands Philharmonic posted it just this week.

Virtual ensembles:

I'm trying to decide what to record next for Untitled Virtual Ensemble. There are a whole bunch of projects; due to limited time and energy I've decided to skip the really famous composers (plenty of people are jumping on those projects anyway) and focus on pieces I'm less likely to have opportunities to play in person.
I'm probably not going to be able to prepare in time for their next project (last movement of Amy Beach's "Gaelic" Symphony which is due next week), so I'm targeting one of the two projects due in late November: Lili Boulanger's "D'un soir triste" or the first movement of Vítězslav Novak's Serenade No. 2. Both date from the beginning of the 20th century. Both deadlines are after the UCDSO concert, so I might be able to do both, but I'm not going to try to push myself too hard. If I can only do one, I haven't quite decided which one is more appealing right now, but I think I'm going to wait until after Camellia Symphony's concerto to commit to one.