So it’s been a while again. The post-COVID fatigue and brain fog were especially bad in late February and for most of March, but it was probably more from exertion than anything else. (It’s mostly post-exertional malaise now, where I don’t feel tired when I’m in the middle of activity but it hits me the next day.) The Brahms/Bruckner concert wiped me out for a full week. I’m not quite at the point of looking for full-time work yet, but I’ve started going to events in the legal community, and I’ve also started working on my required continuing education hours for the 2024-27 cycle, because as long as I have time I might as well get as much of that out of the way as I have the mental bandwidth for. Also, I may not have mentioned this before: I’ve been serving as my orchestra’s librarian since July. Normally it’s not a whole lot of work, and it comes with a small monthly stipend, but our April concert was an unusual amount of effort from a librarian perspective because half of the concert consists of opera selections. I had to go through the full opera scores and confirm start and end points with the conductor, and then extract the necessary pages from each of the instrumental parts on IMSLP (which were all for the full operas). This was probably more work than the previous four concerts combined.

At least the actual orchestra music has been relatively easy since the Brahms/Bruckner concert. Our March concert was our annual Rising Stars concert featuring young soloists (typically either conservatory students or recent graduates). The two main pieces on it were the Grieg piano concerto and the Sibelius violin concerto, both of which I’ve played in orchestras before. We also revived something we used to do annually before the pandemic, a side-by-side performance with the youth orchestra we operate, where each of the youth orchestra string players shared a stand with one of the adult musicians for a short piece. This year’s side-by-side piece was Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Although I wouldn’t call the orchestra parts for either of the concerti easy from a technical standpoint, it was easier for me because I had played everything on the program before – in fact it was my first time playing an orchestral concert where I had played everything before.

And now we’ve had our first two two rehearsals for our next concert at the end of April, which will consist of Verdi opera selections (the Prelude to La Traviata, and a variety of arias), followed by Beethoven’s 6th. Again, it’s a relatively easy program for me because the Beethoven is familiar: I played it three times (in three different orchestras) in the last three and a half years before the pandemic, so it’s mostly about getting my fingers reacquainted with music I know well.

This gives me extra time to work on solo repertoire and technique. I’ve found excess tension creeping into my playing again, especially when practicing the Brahms sonata I’ve been working on, so my last two lessons have centered on relaxing my left hand when playing on the lower strings, and economy of motion in my bow arm. I have a few warm-up exercises (without the viola) that may help, and I’m practicing one-octave scales entirely on the C string for more relaxed shifting.

I’ve also probably sorted out my chamber music club plans for the next year. My trio has become a piano quartet with the addition of a cellist (who happens to be an adult starter, with the big advantage of having been an excellent violinist when he was younger). After taking a long time to work out a rehearsal schedule (everyone had a busy February and early March), we finally met in late March and read through a number of pieces. Because we have limited time before the next house concert (first weekend of June), we decided to go with something that’s less of a technical challenge, and we’re playing the third movement of the Mozart G minor piano quartet. We’re also tentatively planning to take on a bigger challenge for next January, the first movement of the Rheinberger piano quartet. The Rheinberger is something we’re all excited about because we get to introduce the audience to a beautiful, very underrated work that was actually once considered standard repertoire. It was one of the most popular piano quartets in the repertoire for about 50 years after it was composed, before falling out of favor in the 1920s.

It’s already been three weeks since the orchestra concert. I’ve been slow about posting again because of fatigue and brain fog, but it’s not entirely a bad thing: it’s been my most active three weeks since I caught COVID, and I’ve been testing the limits of what I can do without triggering post-exertional malaise for the next day or two. I went out biking for the first time in almost two years (and was wiped out for two days afterward), generally got out to more things than I had been doing in the past year and a half, and had to get some major car repairs done. And the concert itself needed more recovery time than usual.

The concert went well, though it ended up being a bigger challenge than the music itself would have presented. Because our usual venue wasn't available for that weekend, we played the concert at one of our alternate venues, a Catholic church with limited space between the front row of pews and the sanctuary steps. The result was an awkward seating arrangement that had the viola and cello sections going up onto the steps; my seat was six inches above my stand partner, we had to compromise on stand height, and I was looking downward at the music. Also, the folding chairs there were awful and sagged downward at the back. I spent two hours on Friday afternoon before the dress rehearsal looking for a back support cushion at the last minute, and found one just 20 minutes before rehearsal. (Pro tip: best places to find one on short notice are auto parts stores. Target didn’t have them at all, and Office Depot and CVS were sold out of them, but AutoZone had several types in stock.) The cushion helped but my back was still sore all day Sunday. The musical challenge we had to navigate was the acoustics of the place. The acoustics were great for the audience, but there were dead spots around the orchestra where many of us couldn't hear certain parts of the orchestra easily and certain parts sounded delayed because we were mainly hearing echoes. Much of the dress rehearsal was spent correcting spots where the acoustics were throwing people off and causing people to enter early or late. I was still worried about how the orchestra would handle some spots in the concert (especially a tricky second violin entrance that seemed shaky throughout the dress rehearsal) but everyone adjusted and nailed those entrances in the concert.

We jumped straight into rehearsing for the next concert that Monday, without the usual 1-week break. The next program is:

Jean Sibelius, Spring Song
Christian Baldini, Elegy for Strings
Max Bruch, Romanze for viola and orchestra
Robert Schumann, Symphony No. 2

I've linked performances from YouTube above for the pieces that have them.

The Sibelius is an early tone poem, rarely played today though Sibelius himself conducted it often. Baldini is our conductor; his piece is atonal and very atmospheric, with a lot of extended techniques, but apart from rhythmic challenges it’s not technically that difficult to play. I might understand it better once we return to our normal rehearsal/performance venue – our first three rehearsals were at our alternate venue where the acoustics were not very helpful, and from here on out the rest of our rehearsals are at our normal location. The rest of the program is really meaningful to me: the Bruch is the piece I originally auditioned for this orchestra with, and it’s also the only piece I’ve performed as a soloist with an orchestra (this was with a different orchestra where I was principal violist). The Schumann symphony is one I identify strongly with, because Schumann wrote it while coming out of two years of severe depression and other health problems, and it pays tribute to the people and things that helped him recover.

Also, Schumann’s 2nd is the one Schumann symphony I haven’t played yet, which means I’m finishing my personal Schumann cycle! That’s actually true for a whole bunch of people in the orchestra. Only a few other people in the orchestra have played Schumann’s 2nd before – it’s very rarely played by community orchestras because the scherzo is notoriously difficult for the strings. And I played all three other Schumann symphonies in my current orchestra; as an orchestra we’ll have played all four Schumann symphonies in 11 years.

Chamber music has gone more smoothly than we expected when we started rehearsing. When we picked Mozart, we were being cautious because we got a late start to rehearsing the piece, but in last week’s rehearsal (three weeks ahead of the concert) we felt like we were ready to perform, so we ended up spending half of the time getting started on the Rheinberger quartet for next January. The Rheinberger is a bit of a stretch for our cellist (who is just getting into the “advanced” range), and starting on it early is helpful to me because the viola part is probably the most difficult of the three string parts with some very tricky double and triple stops.

Two clips from Monday's rehearsal.

Bruch, Romanze for viola and orchestra, with the soloist. This was our run-through of the piece at the end of the half-hour we spent working on it.

Fourth movement of Schumann's 2nd symphony. We ran the whole symphony (for the first time since the first rehearsal) before we started working on spots in it. There were places where we weren't quite together, but mostly I thought it was good for our confidence.

I'm going through a bit of an end-of-season letdown at the moment. The orchestra concert happened, I went to a viola section BBQ/potluck the next day, and then the season was over. With both chamber music and orchestra concerts being done, I'm not playing in any ensembles until the CalCap Chamber Music Workshop, and there's no practice for that because the workshop involves learning and performing a new piece each day. There's a nice sense of accomplishment, but I've spent all of June adjusting to not playing in a regular ensemble.

Disappointment from the concert isn't helping. The orchestra's concert was an outstanding performance, one of the best performances in the time I've played in this group.  But that great performance was in front of the smallest audience we've had in my 12 years with the orchestra. That's actually something I was afraid would happen even before the concert. Vietnamese (or at least Vietnamese-speaking) hackers hijacked the orchestra's website for three weeks in May, taking away our main route for ticket sales, and we only got the website back up and running a week before the concert. The hackers also took down all the orchestra's social media accounts for a while, which made it harder to promote the concert. We ended up with what looked like only about 100 people in the audience, even fewer than when we resumed performing under pandemic restrictions in 2021. It was a perfect chance to showcase what this orchestra could do, and a milestone concert for me and a whole bunch of other people (finishing the Schumann cycle), and not many people heard it.

I do have musical plans for the summer. There's the CalCap Chamber Music Workshop; this year I'm attending the first session, which is the third week of July.  (No travel involved because it's only a mile and a half from my apartment.) The video game music thing that I was planning to do with other string players from my orchestra is actually going to happen this summer; we're planning a little backyard concert in August. We're not going to start rehearsing for it until the last week of July, though, which gives me some time to contribute some arrangements to it. I have a half-finished arrangement of Sogno di Volare from Civilization VI, and depending on time and energy I may also arrange some music from Chrono Trigger. Speaking of arranging, I'm in the middle of discussing with Marijke what this summer's group project is going to be.

And the biggest thing is my chamber music club's "Sonata Saturday" recital in August. I've already committed to it, with the same pianist who plays in my quartet. Just as with the chamber music concerts, we have a 10 minute guideline, which means one movement of a sonata or possibly two short movements. We've discussed options and narrowed it to two candidates for this summer: either the second movement of the Brahms E-flat major sonata, or the first movement of the Ludwig Norman viola sonata. The Brahms is more convenient for me because I've already worked on it a lot, but the piano part is more difficult; the Norman has an easier piano part but I'm learning it from scratch this summer. I'm going to meet with the pianist at some point next week to play through both and see what makes more sense for us. In the meantime, I've started working on the Norman and getting it under my fingers. I was able to get in one lesson before my viola teacher went off to Ireland for three weeks, and got some good suggestions on bowings and fingerings.

I recorded the first page of the Norman sonata when I was just a few days into learning it. This was about two weeks ago; I think it was my fourth practice day on the piece, and two days after the one lesson I had on it.

It makes more sense with the piano, of course -- for a good chunk of that first page the viola is playing counterpoint while the piano has the main melody. There's a professional recording on YouTube.