I suppose I should post an update.

As you may have already seen in "Share a Video," I finally got around to performing Bach Cello Suite No. 2 in full as a solo mini-recital, two weeks ago. I needed to recover from the series of emergencies that disrupted the end of the semester, and then needed to knock off a bit of rust from having barely practiced the Bach for a while. The performance ended up being rather spontaneous: I decided to schedule it only a week ahead of time, and picked a spot in the UC Davis Arboretum that I thought matched the meditative character of the piece. I was deliberately keeping it informal, and putting it in a place where random passers-by could stop and listen. I had a few friends there in person, and a few more (along with my viola teacher) watching on a Facebook Live stream.

After that, I took a week off from the viola, and then got started on my next musical projects.

I've come up with another arrangement for Marijke's annual worldwide collaboration, which should be announced soon. I can't say what it is yet, but I'll just mention that 1) it's a movie theme, and 2) it's going to be somewhat easier to play than last year's Legend of Zelda project.

This week I'm making another recording for Untitled Virtual Ensemble: Uranus from Holst's The Planets. I've practiced it a little just as a refresher; I don't need to practice it a lot because I just played The Planets in June. (Note that I posted a video of Uranus in rehearsal from my music stand earlier in this thread!)

I'm also getting ready to host my first UVE project. UVE relies on members to propose and "host" projects, which means providing parts and click tracks, handling sign-up sheets as needed, and receiving submitted recordings. (I don't have to do the mixing or video production; there's a production team that can handle that.)

I'm not keeping this one secret: the piece I'm hosting will be the overture to Alberto Nepomuceno's unfinished/abandoned opera O Garatuja (The Scribbler), and I'm anticipating having all the materials ready some time around the middle of August. Nepomuceno was the first notable Brazilian nationalist composer, and fought a long uphill battle to get Brazilian folk and popular music accepted in the concert hall. During his life, he was often criticized and ridiculed in the Brazilian classical music establishment for using folk melodies and popular rhythms, for adopting Brazilian percussion instruments, for writing Portuguese-language vocal music, and even for socializing with popular singers and songwriters. Most of his music is rarely played today, but he almost singlehandedly paved the way for the much more famous Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Here's a live concert recording of the overture:

I'm also jumping back into live performance next week, for just one week. I'm playing in the orchestra for the Elk Grove Strauss Festival, which is a big dance show that takes place on an outdoor stage at the end of every July. The music isn't hard (it's all Viennese waltzes, polkas, and such) but it's still a pretty intense week: orchestra rehearsal on Tuesday, dress rehearsal with dancers on Wednesday, and then four performances on Thursday through Sunday nights.

One other thing of interest: I've been invited to join a newly formed string octet to play video game music, with some really excellent musicians. We'll meet for the first time in August and figure out repertoire and possible performance opportunities. The person organizing it, who plays violin in Camellia Symphony, has written some of her own arrangements of classic Nintendo themes, and is encouraging everyone else to arrange music and/or bring any arrangements they might have.

Still haven't had a lesson this month, due to continued post-COVID symptoms (some brain fog and coughing, both gradually getting better but not gone), and my teacher is busy performing at a music festival this week anyway. So I'm just slowly working my way through the Brahms and Hoffmeister.

With the Hoffmeister concerto, I'm finding that I may have to make a decision as to what notes to play at a few points. As I mentioned when I posted an early progress video, the edition I already had on my shelf is a terrible one, where the editor takes a lot of liberties with the notes beginning on the second page. I now also have a Henle Urtext edition, with lots of scholarly notes on the source material.

And now I'm going to get a little nerdy about this. It's a very ironic situation because Hoffmeister was better known as a music publisher than as a composer -- he founded the publishing house now known as Edition Peters, he was Mozart's publisher for some time, and he was Beethoven's first publisher in Vienna. But his viola concerto was not published until after his death, even though he could easily have done it himself at any time. There is no surviving manuscript score. What survives from Hoffmeister's lifetime is a set of hand-copied parts, which appear to have been prepared by three different copyists, none of whom were Hoffmeister himself. These parts were most likely used for multiple performances, by at least three different soloists who all made markings in the solo part. Some of these markings are in pen, which makes it hard to tell in certain places what is original and what was changed later. The Henle edition contains extensive notes on this, which helps.

But there's one spot in the first movement where I think I'm going to have to make a decision. That's measure 79. In the source material, the solo viola plays double-stops in a D major chord, and the orchestral parts show a B minor chord. In the International edition (first picture), which I'm not using (due to lots of other editorial changes), the editor corrects the orchestral parts to D major to match the solo part. In the Henle edition (second picture), the editor corrects the solo part to B minor to match the orchestral parts, but there's a note at the bottom of the page about it. Other editions are divided on this: some use a D major chord, others use a B minor chord. And the recordings on YouTube are likewise divided.

Unless my teacher strongly objects, I'm probably going to go with B minor both because it's easier to play with small hands, and because the Henle editors have discussed their reasons for it. But it illustrates some of the things that one may have to think about when playing older music, and why choice of edition matters. 

The concert happened. I'm still severely limited by post-COVID symptoms. I ended up writing a lot more fingerings, reminder accidentals, and cues in my parts than I normally would, in order to limit the amount of thinking I needed to do in the dress rehearsal and concert. (Up until that point, every rehearsal left me exhausted for a full day afterward.) Even though fingerings are mostly automatic for me, even the little bits of subconscious thought make a difference. The extra penciled-in markings were just enough to get me through the concert.

I see I haven't mentioned what Sarah Wald actually wrote for us. It ended up being completely different from any of the pieces with recordings on her website, and it was both a lot of fun to play and (according to a friend who was at the concert) a lot of fun to listen to. We had given her complete artistic license, with the only limit being that she had to use no more winds and brass than we were already going to have for Elgar and Brahms. She noticed that both of the other pieces on our program were in E minor, so she decided first to make E minor a running theme throughout the concert, and then to bookend the program with something that was a sort of re-composition of Brahms. Her piece, After Brahms, was inspired by and based loosely on the last movement of Brahms's 4th Symphony. The last movement of the Brahms is a passacaglia, a set of variations played over a repeating bass pattern. (That pattern can be seen in Wikipedia article on the Brahms symphony, which shows the first eight measures of the movement.) What Sarah did was take the top line from the first eight measures, move it down two octaves, and use that as the repeating bass pattern in a quirky, off-kilter passacaglia. She also played a lot with tempo and rhythm, using a Latin-like 3+3+2 rhythm pattern, and accelerating throughout the piece from ~40 bpm at the beginning to ~160 bpm at the end. I hope this piece turns up on YouTube. Unfortunately this orchestra doesn't live-stream, so if stuff appears online it's usually some time later.

Keep an eye on Sarah Wald. I've played new music from a bunch of composers now, and she's probably the most talented composer of them all, with an incredible stylistic range.

Again, I haven't seen any audio or video from the concert, but here's a short clip from rehearsal (from the first movement of Elgar) that the orchestra posted on its social media accounts.

I haven’t been active here in a while because I still have post-COVID brain fog, and I’m playing an especially challenging orchestra program that has taken most of my energy. The upcoming concert – this Saturday – is a bold one for any orchestra, and challenging under normal circumstances, let alone with post-COVID symptoms. It’s a relatively modern program, with the earliest piece on it being composed in 1944.

We’re playing the following pieces (click titles for performances on YouTube):
Salina Fisher, Murmuring Light
Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs
Sergei Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5

It’s an interesting program, but a challenging one. Murmuring Light is very atmospheric, and has some interesting effects in the percussion section. (Including, of all things, natural harmonics on a piano!) At least the string parts aren't difficult apart from timing some slow glissando notes.

Both Strauss and Prokofiev involve a lot of chromaticism, but in different ways. Even though all four Strauss songs are in slow tempi, the strings have a lot of fast notes that are supposed to create a sort of shimmering sound behind the singer, and the songs modulate unexpectedly. Prokofiev, meanwhile, intentionally makes everything sound a little off-kilter. I think of it as funhouse mirror music. This means a lot of unexpected accidentals and unusual modulations (often jumping between sharp and flat keys). I'm managing it all with lots of fingerings, reminder accidentals, and even arrows for shifts and brackets reminding me to keep a finger down -- all stuff that I wouldn't need nearly as much of normally.

Just some examples of passages in the Prokofiev that I'm practicing: one clip of me spending some time working on just two measures of the second movement, and one of me playing through a page of the fourth movement at about 70% speed with metronome.

I’m also getting used to playing with earplugs for the first time. I’ve never needed earplugs when playing in orchestras until this fall, but one of my post-COVID symptoms has been increased sensitivity to bright lights and loud sounds. I didn’t really notice the auditory part of it in the first concert program (Wald, Elgar, Brahms) because none of the pieces on the program included really heavy or dissonant brass passages, but Prokofiev involves a lot more brass. So I went and bought a pair of hi-fi earplugs, and started using them two weeks ago. (Oddly, musicians’ earplugs seem to be in short supply... after finding them sold out at two different local music stores and at the local Guitar Center, I started calling music stores all over town and ended up having to drive 25 minutes out into the suburbs to find one that had them in stock.)

Murmuring Light happens to be a bit of a small-world moment for me. Through my involvement in Untitled Virtual Ensemble, I met the music librarian for a New Zealand orchestra, who has recorded trumpet tracks for UVE. I asked him if he was familiar with Salina Fisher or the piece at all. He said they were good friends, and offered to contact his colleague at Auckland Philharmonia about getting the marked-up string parts from the New Zealand premiere of the piece! So Camellia Symphony will be using the string parts from the performance seen in the YouTube video above, with bowings and some important cues penciled in by that orchestra's principal players.

Outside of orchestra music, my viola lessons have been focused mostly on recovery, though I’m spending some time filling technique gaps through the repertoire I’m working on. I’m working on collé bowing, which will help with the Classical style of the Hoffmeister concerto, and also practicing going into wide vibrato without tensing up. I’m now practicing the first two movements of the Brahms E-flat sonata, and the entire first movement of the Hoffmeister concerto, but not spending much time on them until after the concert because I just don’t have much brain space for solo rep much while still coping with brain fog.

ABitRusty said

@AndrewH said "Murmuring Light happens to be a bit of a small-world moment for me. Through my involvement in Untitled Virtual Ensemble, I met the music librarian for a New Zealand orchestra, who has recorded trumpet tracks for UVE. I asked him if he was familiar with Salina Fisher or the piece at all. He said they were good friends, and offered to contact his colleague at Auckland Philharmonia about getting the marked-up string parts from the New Zealand premiere of the piece! So Camellia Symphony will be using the string parts from the performance seen in the YouTube video above, with bowings and some important cues penciled in by that orchestra's principal players"

I dont know what it is about those kind of connections but I always think the stories are neat.  I guess in the grand scheme of things the orchestra world, people playing at that level, is small but its still cool to be able to reach across the globe and have access to those resources.

Hopefully things will get better with the post covid for you. One of the healthiest people I know..And I mean diet, workouts, everything about his health... had to be hosiptialized for a pretty good while.  we almost lost him.  

  

I think one of the silver linings of the pandemic was that it actually brought the orchestra world closer in many ways.

Maybe the professional music world was closer because people travel to study, to play in music festivals, and to audition for professional orchestras. But those of us playing at amateur and semipro level tended to mostly see the same people within a certain radius. For example: I'm in a city with a very active high-level amateur classical music scene, with three elite community orchestras in Greater Sacramento, and two very good university orchestras that are both open to alumni. But the three top-tier orchestras share a lot of personnel. Before the pandemic I subbed in one of the others for a concert and noticed that they had a double-digit number of regular members who also played in my orchestra. And even the university orchestras have a bit of overlap, because each includes local alumni: when I played in the UC Davis orchestra last year, there were at least four people I already knew from Camellia Symphony. So I guess it was a small world locally, but most of the connection I had to people outside of the local area came from going to summer chamber music workshops.

When live music shut down for a year and a half, many people started to see the possibilities of virtual ensembles, and I met friends I never would have run into just by playing in local ensembles. In the 15 months that Socially Distant Orchestra was active, it managed to include people on every continent except Antarctica, which is really cool. Untitled Virtual Ensemble is also an international group, hence my running into someone in New Zealand who knew Salina Fisher personally.

As for post-COVID, at least there's nothing life-threatening. For me, the acute illness was mild. I felt really sick for about half a day, then had a low-grade fever and a cough for four days after that, and that was it as far as acute symptoms went. But post-COVID syndrome seems to affect some percentage of people even if they have very mild symptoms from the infection. Apparently I had a risk factor I wasn't aware of because it's still being studied: there's some evidence (not conclusive but enough  to justify further study) that a history of concussions makes post-COVID brain fog more likely, and I do have a long-ago history of concussions from high school and college soccer.