My orchestra's spring schedule is always a bit hectic because we have concerts in three consecutive months. Our concert program with Sibelius's 5th was last weekend; on Monday we were already rehearsing for the next concert, which is at the end of this month. The next program is Respighi's Vetrate di Chiesa and Bruckner's Te Deum.

I've been extra busy because the Respighi turned out to be an orchestra librarian's nightmare. We've played it before, back in 2017, but at the time we rented it because it was still under copyright. It's been public domain since 2022. The set of parts on IMSLP is not a professionally published edition, but was copied from the score by a volunteer/hobbyist, and for some reason it omitted the organ and piano parts. I contacted our former librarian from when we played it before, and he still had the organ part, but I had to copy the piano part from the score myself (I did that more than a month ago). Then, two weeks before the first rehearsal, when I was about to email the parts out to the orchestra, our principal trombonist alerted me to the low brass parts being unusable because of entire passages being copied from the wrong parts in the score. He volunteered to make new low brass parts, but that sent me back to checking all the other IMSLP parts. The other IMSLP parts were better, but almost all still had a lot of errors. I ended up completely recopying the first 39 measures of the second movement for English horn and second and third trumpets, making inserts for missing or incorrect passages in several other parts, and typing up an 11-page errata list, and it took me something like 25 hours over six days. Another orchestra librarian I know through Untitled Virtual Ensemble suggested that the volume of errors means I should probably flag the parts on IMSLP for deletion so that other orchestra librarians don’t have to wade through the same mess.

Anyway, the first rehearsal happened, and the corrections seemed to work... except for the contrabassoonist not reading the entire email and not noticing the errata list before rehearsal, but that got cleared up quickly. For my own part, the Respighi wasn't nearly as hard as I remember it being from 2017, even though I was sight-reading in the first rehearsal. That's in part because I'm more comfortable in the upper register now, but also because I know the score well enough to be aware of where I actually need to play the notes accurately (this includes one nasty passage in E-flat minor) and where it's just for effect and close is good enough.

Other than that, I’m still working on the viola part of the Turina piano quartet, continuing to solidify the Hoffmeister concerto, and learning the first and fourth movements of the Norman sonata. Quartet rehearsals are still productive – we rehearsed today, and we were able to play through the fast second movement and stay together at what I’d consider an acceptable performance tempo for the first time.

My orchestra moves quickly, for a non-professional orchestra. We’re already just one week away from the concert. This rehearsal cycle was actually a week longer than our usual because our weekly rehearsal night is Monday and we didn’t rehearse on Memorial Day. Still, it went by more quickly than I expected.

I’ve found that I appreciate Mahler’s string writing a lot more than I expected to. Although there are tricky passages and a few spots where the best fingering isn’t what’s intuitive from sight-reading, everything fits the left hand quite comfortably once it’s learned. Almost nothing is physically awkward. This was a bit surprising because Mahler did not play a string instrument.

The Mahler accounts for almost all the home practice I’m doing for the concert. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei is for cello and orchestra, and the orchestral parts are fairly straightforward. The newly composed piece on the program, “Turbios” by Gabriel Bolaños, is mostly extended techniques in the string parts, intended mostly to create a cloudy effect. For the strings, the only “normal” bowed notes are in the very last measure of the piece. The only thing in the viola part that really needed any practice at all was a pair of leaps to the high E-flat above the treble clef, and even those aren’t extremely critical and have plenty of opportunity for correction because they’re pizzicato, repeating the same note as fast as possible, which can't be done very loudly at that pitch anyway.

This week I took advantage of the no-rehearsal week and got my bow rehaired, so for most of the week I practiced on my backup bow. It’s an inexpensive student bow, so it’s tip-heavy and stiff. It’s not all bad, because I find fast back-and-forth string crossing slightly easier with the backup bow, but the tradeoff is that I find fast spiccato, sautille, and up-bow staccato difficult with that bow. I got my primary bow back from the luthier late Thursday afternoon, completely rosinless. I don’t mind that, but it takes quite a bit of furious rosining to get my bow back to what I’d like. Even after two rosinings and two practice sessions on the rehaired bow, there are still spots that feel a bit slippery.

Next weekend is actually going to be a two-concert weekend for me, because my chamber music performance is the day after my orchestra concert. Being not fully recovered from long COVID, I’ll probably have to play through a lot of fatigue and possibly some brain fog in the chamber music concert. At least my group is quite well prepared, and it’s in front of a supportive audience of mostly other amateur musicians.

I went to three Mellon Music Festival concerts in Davis last weekend -- all the festival concerts except the Thursday noon concert at UC Davis. The Mellon Festival is a highlight for me every year. As usual, the performances were excellent and the programming was thoughtful. I especially appreciate the choice of contemporary pieces, because they hit the sweet spot where they were both accessible and challenging -- maybe more comments on those later if I have time.

Hope you start getting some sleep soon!

For me the long COVID has been continuous (improving but not gone yet) since August 2022. I still get hit with post-exertional malaise and brain fog after about two busy days, so I'm almost always wiped out for at least a full day after an orchestra concert.