My trio performed the Scharwenka last weekend. No video, but I think it went well, and the piece was well-received.

Again, this was a house concert for the informal chamber music club that I rejoined last summer. They organize two house concerts each year, in January and June, and a “Sonata Day” in August.

Just to give an idea of what other people were doing, the program was:

Handel, Trio Sonata HWV 393, version for 2 cellos and keyboard (complete)
Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2, II. Andante con moto
Scharwenka, Trio for Violin, Viola, and Piano Op. 121, I. Andantino tranquillo
Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 2, II. Largo con espressione
Saint-Saens, Piano Trio No. 2, III. Andante con moto
Borodin, String Quartet No. 2, I. Allegro moderato

The guideline is to limit performances to 10 minutes (a couple minutes over is OK), so except for the Handel trio sonata which was about 9 minutes long in its entirety, everyone played only single movements. Groups ranged from intermediate learners playing music that was a bit of a stretch for them, all the way to highly skilled musicians aiming for polished performances; it's really about providing a low-pressure performance venue with a supportive audience for amateurs with a whole variety of chamber music goals. The audience was just performers and some friends and family -- looked like about 40 people, half of whom were performing.

We’re planning to keep the trio together for the next house concert in June, and hoping to add a cellist to make it a piano quartet because there's much more music for piano quartet than for violin, viola, and piano. On the other hand, if we can’t find a cellist, we might play the Lachner or Reuss trios that we looked at before. There's still plenty of time to decide on something.

On the orchestral front, the first rehearsal happened last week, and the Bruckner is still a real challenge. It’s technically more difficult than I anticipated. Not at all insurmountable, but it will take a lot more practice time than I expected and I’m having to cut back on practicing solo repertoire. Fortunately, we actually have a slightly longer rehearsal cycle than usual: same number of rehearsals, but we skipped a week due to MLK Day, and it means extra time to get the notes under our fingers between the first two rehearsals.

Random side note: thanks to Dave Hurwitz's YouTube channel, I now can’t hear Bruckner’s name without expecting it to be followed by whinnying horses. (He plays the sound effect every time he mentions Bruckner. It's a running gag and a reference to Young Frankenstein.)

One more rehearsal clip... I took this because I wanted to check where I need to be more aware of my tempo and/or intonation. This is a fugal passage early in the fourth movement. (And there is one bit late in the clip that needs a lot more practice: the intonation in measures 55-56 goes off quite a bit.)

What the viola part actually reads there:

I think the best answer to that question is: it depends.

My viola is right under my ear, so unless I'm playing very softly, it's the loudest thing I hear. You can hear that in the videos I've posted, because my viola is similarly the closest instrument to the camera. And the parts are written to fit together, so unless it's dissonant modern music, under ideal conditions it shouldn't be too hard to hear whether I'm in tune and in tempo. Of course, we don't play under ideal conditions most of the time.

The better everyone else is playing, the easier it is to follow. It's often hard for me to hear all the errors in my own playing in the first rehearsal. If multiple people are playing out of tune, it becomes a challenge to tell who I'm supposed to be tuning to or harmonizing with. Sometimes, in early rehearsals, I can tell that I'm off but it's not clear to me whether I'm sharp or flat. But as we progress through rehearsals and everyone plays more accurately, it becomes more obvious if what I'm playing doesn't sound right among all the other notes being played, and it becomes easier to correct errors.

The better I know my own part, the easier it is to listen to other parts and watch the baton, because there's more mental bandwidth available to pay attention to them. And knowing how it should fit together (both from listening to the piece and from repetition in rehearsals) also helps.

The space matters: not only external noise but also the room acoustics. We normally play in an auditorium with excellent acoustics, which makes it easier to hear everything that's going on. However, in our first year back from the pandemic shutdown we rehearsed at our alternate rehearsal venue, and we still have occasional rehearsals there on nights when our usual venue isn't available for some reason (e.g. most recently when there was a high school theater production using the space for a week). That alternate rehearsal venue is a very echoey church, where the sound can get quite muddy. It's noticeably harder to play there and follow what the rest of the orchestra is doing.

I can see how casual fiddle sessions might be challenging sometimes: there are people with varying skill levels and varying levels of familiarity with the tune, the acoustics are ideal, and there may be other noise unrelated to the musicians. But it should get easier over the course of the session, as people become more familiar with the music being played.

I've finally mostly recovered from last weekend, which was my big concert weekend. A lot of the fatigue was from not planning my week well enough; I had a bunch of miscellaneous urgent errands on Thursday and Friday before the concert, which led to Saturday possibly being my worst brain fog day in the last six months. Still, I'm clearly in better shape than I was a year ago, because I was able to play the entire concert without losing my place in the music except for about six measures in the fourth movement of the Bruckner, and managed to avoid audible errors. (The worst error I made in the concert was missing two changes from pizz to arco in the Brahms, which is much less noticeable than a mistake in the opposite direction!) So... I could have done a bit better if I were better rested, but it wasn't bad for a concert that would have been a real endurance test even without the brain fog and chronic fatigue. It helped that we didn't run through the entire Bruckner symphony in the morning's dress rehearsal... our conductor described that as "like running a half-marathon before the marathon." Instead, he just tried to touch on all the points he wanted to emphasize from prior rehearsals.

During the dress rehearsal, I set up my phone on a tripod offstage while we were rehearsing the first movement of the Bruckner, and extracted two clips from that. I'm quite clearly visible in both clips.

First, here's 10 minutes of rehearsal, for more of a "behind the scenes" view. There are a couple viola moments very early in the symphony. After a short cello and bass pizzicato introduction, the first bit of melody (at 2:39) belongs to the viola section alone for four measures, then violas with first violins doubling an octave above (from 2:55) for the rest of the phrase. Then, when the first main theme appears (5:31 of the video), it's the viola and cello sections in unison.

And here's the end of the first movement, which I posted on to my own social media accounts as last-minute concert promotion because it was one of the longest segments we played without interruption while rehearsing the movement. Incidentally, the excerpt of the viola part that I attached to an earlier post (#127) includes the first 35 seconds of this video.

After the concert, I went out for a late dinner and drinks with a bunch of other orchestra members, ten of us in all. I'm pretty sure it was the first time we've had a big group do that since before the pandemic. Between that and the holiday party in December, it's nice to finally get back to seeing people from the orchestra outside of rehearsals and concerts a bit more, when our minds aren't so focused on the work in front of us.

I took the whole week off from practicing after the concert. The next two orchestra concerts will be relatively easy for me because I've played all the big pieces on both programs before, so that gives me some space to practice solo rep and get chamber music plans figured out.