I'm going to record the Novak, mostly because it's easier. I haven't started working on it yet, but it shouldn't require a ton of practice; the viola part goes very high, but in a slow tempo, and other than that there aren't big technical challenges. The timing of these projects isn't great, I'm just a bit swamped by non-music things right now.

As I mentioned in another thread, I've felt a bit discouraged lately, a combination of imposter syndrome, a minor finger injury that kept me out for a few days, frustration with not having much time to practice solo rep, and being in a university orchestra with so many talented young musicians who have had all kinds of opportunities that I envy. But that's already starting to pass, especially after a good rehearsal last night. Self-doubt seems to be a very common experience among string players, probably because string instruments are simply hard to play.

Otherwise, I've just been working on the same things: Bach and music for the upcoming concert. I've had plenty of time to work on the Sibelius because I was playing it in two orchestras, so it's very solid now. The 3 and 4 way divisi passages have been restored to the more typical divisi by chair, as the viola section was reinforced in the first week of November by two alumni who had not been available earlier in the year. The McPhee is still tricky because of its rhythms (and hand-copied parts), but the main challenge on concert night is just staying focused through the entire piece. The Wantenaar piece also has rhythmic challenges, but in a different sense: it's heavily influenced by French impressionism, so there's a lot of three-against-two and a lot of rubato.

Concert is tomorrow night, 7pm Pacific, and it's being livestreamed again. We had our last full-length rehearsal last night, and based on that rehearsal I think the concert is going to be spectacular. 

I don't mean to imply that I feel disrespected in any way by the undergrads -- if anything, they tend to assume that the grad students, university staff, and alumni in the orchestra are far more experienced than them. Nor am I implying that they didn't work hard. No one gets to where they can audition successfully for this orchestra and play this kind of repertoire without working hard.

It's more envy on my part. I envy the opportunities for high-quality training, from top-notch teachers and in elite youth orchestras, that often aren't available to people who start later. (In my case I was turned away from beginner lessons by teachers who said I was too old to even learn the basics.) I envy the fluidity of motion that comes from having practiced since early childhood. And I envy the family support that many of the undergrads have, after seeing some of their parents show up at the first concert in October. Things like that. Not by any means things that guarantee success, but things that help a lot.

I'm especially curious about what you thought of Tabuh-Tabuhan? Playing it was certainly a unique experience.

Since I didn't mention it before: "tabuh" is a Balinese word meaning "mallet" and also used to mean "beat" in music. Thus the title "Tabuh-Tabuhan" literally means "beat-beats" in the Balinese language, which speaks to the importance of rhythm in the piece.

"Gamelan on steroids" was more-or-less the impression I got too. Of course it's not really gamelan music; McPhee said as much, calling it a "purely personal" work and aiming to convey the experience of a Westerner in Indonesia rather than try to truly imitate a gamelan. But there were some things that were taken directly from Indonesia: for example, the flute melody that begins the second movement is an actual Balinese folk melody. Being in the middle of that wall of sound, especially in the very busy third movement, was interesting. McPhee did a lot of things with orchestration that conventional wisdom would say ruins the balance of the ensemble, but it all worked. It was just a completely different type of music.

Playing the Sibelius in both of my orchestras, I was struck by how different the experience was. I think acoustics matter a lot. With Camellia, it was sometimes easy to miss entrances simply because the acoustics of our rehearsal space could be a bit muddy.  UCDSO, on the other hand, has the privilege of playing in a world-class concert hall, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to play in that orchestra and even one of the reasons I chose UC Davis for my LL.M degree. Everything sounded more crisp and easier to follow while playing. On the other hand, the acoustics are also less forgiving of mistimed entrances. I got a bit lucky with my one serious error in the Sibelius: I played a run two beats early at one point, and it probably would have been easily noticeable if not for the fact that that my error actually put me in unison with the second violins.

One thing I wasn't aware of until I heard it in rehearsal this week is a bit of the story behind Sibelius's 2nd. Because of the time in which it was written (just after Finlandia), listeners often think of it as the most Finnish of Sibelius's symphonies, and as a protest against Russian rule. Sibelius insisted that there was nothing programmatic about it, and that people were reading too much into it. But it turns out that it does have its origin in program music -- just not what most people imagine. Sibelius began working on it during a year's sabbatical in Italy. While in Italy, he had the idea of writing a tone poem based on Dante's Divine Comedy, but abandoned the project after a short time. His sketches for that tone poem, however, ended up being reworked into the second movement of his 2nd Symphony. (And suddenly I see the chant-like theme at the beginning of the movement in a different light.) The same movement that is often thought of as either a protest or a Scandinavian landscape was in fact inspired by Dante.

We decided only at the last full-length rehearsal on Thursday night to have all the brass players stand up for the last few measures of the symphony, to give them a bit of extra punch. It definitely had that effect. From the viola section, I could easily hear the exact moment the brass players stood up.

I've been a bit swamped lately, so there's a bit of catch-up to do. I had a final paper due the Monday after Thanksgiving (for a seminar class that ended about a month before the other classes), and an in-class presentation on a different final paper in progress the same day, so except for a quick trip to my sister's house in the Bay Area for Thanksgiving afternoon and evening, I basically spent the entire long weekend scrambling to finish both.

That's not to say that I didn't play. I just didn't really practice for the entire week after the concert. That Friday, I needed a change of scenery and decided to go work in the law school's student lounge for most of the afternoon and evening. The idea was: with the building almost completely deserted, and no cat around, I could leave my viola case open and play whenever I needed to take a break. That day I finally got around to playing through the entire Bach Cello Suite No. 2, from beginning to end, for the first time. I've now done that twice: the second time was today, in the law school courtyard. (Today was tougher, because it got chilly in the late afternoon and it made fingers harder to move.)

I'm off from orchestras until January. UCDSO had a short rehearsal this week, just to distribute the music for the next concert and do a first reading of it without spending too much time working on anything. This gives everyone winter break to practice before resuming rehearsals in January. On the program: three opera overtures (Mozart's Don Giovanni, Johann Strauss Jr's Die Fledermaus, and Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3) and a newly composed cello concerto by Argentine composer Alejandro Civilotti -- we'll have Eduardo Vassallo, principal cellist of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, crossing the Atlantic to perform with us.

Today was my first serious practice session since the concert. I was on campus for the day, so reserved a practice room for the maximum two hours. I spent about 20 minutes on pure technique, to get my fingers moving and really work on resetting my sense of intonation, as my first finger was consistently going a bit sharp: mostly Sevcik, as well as an exercise I've gotten from my viola teacher of crawling up two strings in alternating double-stopped thirds and fourths. Next, about 50 minutes on the Bach suite, focusing on the Courante, Menuet, and Gigue. I took a 15-minute break from playing the viola at that point and used the piano to work out what some of the trickier bits of the Civilotti viola part should sound like, and then the remaining time split between the Clarke sonata and the Brahms E-flat sonata, both of which I'd like to work on during the month of December while orchestras are idle.

One funny incident last Friday in the student lounge: a few people walked in and out while I was playing, and one of my LL.M classmates stopped to listen to the last movement of the Bach suite and told me my guitar sounded good! To be fair: many LL.M students are foreign law graduates who are getting the degree because they need some kind of US law degree to take a US bar exam, and this classmate in particular was from Saudi Arabia. So his first language isn't English, and he had actually never seen a violin-family instrument before. For some reason the Arabian Peninsula never adopted the violin into its folk music even though violins are used widely in Arab folk music elsewhere. (I'm aware of this because, again, I grew up in Dubai myself.) Still, I was a little surprised, because surely he'd seen enough guitars to know that my viola wasn't one! Maybe he thought "guitar" was a generic word for string instruments? In any case, I got to introduce someone to not only the viola but the entire family of instruments, and it was also the most surprising thing someone has mistaken my viola for. (I once had someone at the airport see my case and ask me whether I played trombone professionally, but that person never saw the actual instrument. I've also been complimented on my cello playing on two different occasions.)

One more concert done. And it was a real workout. This one was with Camellia Symphony, featuring the Prokofiev Symphony-Concerto and Beethoven's 7th. Both pieces are intense and drive forward relentlessly, especially the last two movements of Beethoven.

No video of us, so I'm just going to post videos of other orchestras playing the pieces.

With the Prokofiev, I spent a lot of time working on the passage that you hear from about 8:08 in the video: it leaps a 9th to the C# above the treble clef (so it's a shift  straight from 1st to 7th position) and needs to be played legato. The arpeggiated figures at the very end of the piece were tricky too, not least because the easiest fingerings for me involved some non-intuitive shifting. The photo below is the last two pages of the piece: at the speed it was going, I had to mark some of the non-obvious shifts with up and down arrows (bottom four lines of second-last page).

Beethoven's 7th was especially challenging for me because it calls for so much sautillé bowing: basically all of the third and fourth movements, and much of the first. Yes, the left hand fingers have to be agile as well, but my technical deficiencies are mostly in the bow hand. A lot of it comes from not being used to small bow strokes with mainly wrist and finger motion, because I didn't start to learn bowing technique properly until the last few years. A little of it might be from starting late and thus not developing much wrist flexibility at ages when it would have been easier. I can do it, it just still takes a lot of attention to basic technique.

Other than that, there were some extra challenges unrelated to the music itself. I actually had to sit out almost half of the dress rehearsal, because I cut my hand getting out of my car right before the rehearsal, right on the pad of my left middle finger. (Not sure how it happened, but the finish on the interior door handle was damaged and there was a sharp edge I didn't notice.) I needed to wait until the bleeding stopped before playing, so that I wouldn't bleed on my strings and fingerboard. By the time we played the concert, there was no danger of bleeding, but the finger was still a bit irritated. I'm taking the rest of the long weekend off from playing viola at all, so that the finger can heal completely.

There's still another concert coming up in two weeks with UCDSO. That one will be livestreamed, and I'll post a link closer to the concert date.

On the solo side, two new developments.

First, my viola teacher and I have decided that I'm going to perform Bach's Cello Suite No. 2, in its entirety, on a live stream some time during the law school's spring break in the second half of March. I don't have a date set yet, and I'm going to have to figure out what platform I want to use for it.

Second, my teacher has recently been hired to teach viola at a liberal arts college, and because I'm currently her only advanced viola student outside of the college, she's going to try to give me the opportunity to attend studio classes and participate in studio recitals for no extra charge, if the college allows it and the logistics of having just one person attend remotely can be worked out. (Everyone else would be in person, but for me commuting from California to the East Coast is not exactly a practical option.) Whether it works out or not, it's a big confidence booster: she thinks I would not look out of place in a college-level studio that includes viola performance majors. Maybe that should have been obvious already, given the orchestras I already play in, but I tend to get imposter syndrome in those orchestras, so to hear it from someone I've been taking lessons from for a year is encouraging.