ELCBK said
I was curious about Francis Judd Cooke, but I can't find any music to hear on YT except an organ piece I didn't like. 

Have you found anywhere I can hear more of his work?

  

Unfortunately not. I went looking for his music, and the only recording I was able to find online was that one organ piece.

I'm finally starting to recover from the workshop now. After taking the recovery day, I actually made it through the last two days much better than the first two days, but I was still too wiped out to do much over the weekend. It was by far the busiest week I've had since I caught COVID two years ago. Exhausting but totally worth it, and it was a good test of where I am in my recovery.

Wednesday night I did end up playing some after all. The pianist from my quartet (and who I'm working with for Sonata Day) came in for the evening, we found a clarinetist, and we ended up reading through Schumann's Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) and Mozart's "Kegelstatt" Trio.

After that, the clarinetist decided to retire for the night, and because we still had the room reserved for another hour, the pianist and I decided to take a little time to rehearse our piece for next month. We had decided on Brahms because of the limited rehearsal time remaining: our first meeting to decide on a piece was two weeks later than originally planned, as he had to postpone due to COVID, so we had only a month and CalCap was taking a week of it. Although the piano part is more difficult than the Norman, the Brahms turns out to be easier to put together because the timing of the entrances is more straightforward. It turned out to be a very useful rehearsal because I had left the viola part at home and was playing from memory: I stood where I could see the piano score, and because the piano score included the clarinet part, I noticed the differences between the clarinet and viola versions, which were more significant than I thought.

Thursday was back to the normal workshop schedule. After 20th century music both Monday and Tuesday, my Thursday assignment took me back to the Classical period with the first movement of Franz Xaver Süssmayr's Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello. Süssmayr's music isn't played often, but his name is a familiar one because he was the composer who completed Mozart's Requiem after Mozart's death.

The best was saved for last. Friday's assignment was the second movement of the Brahms Op. 18 sextet, with probably the best group of musicians I've ever played in at CalCap. I knew it was probably going to be a good performance after the first sight-reading of the piece in the morning, because we got through the entire piece without stopping, and mostly stayed together, with only a few errors, which meant we were working on balance and interpretation from the very beginning of our rehearsal time. One group member had a friend take a video of our performance in the evening, so I should have that video at some point in the near future. For now, I can post video taken from my music stand during rehearsal. This was a run-through during the afternoon rehearsal session.

I still had enough energy to freelance on Friday night, and ended up putting up a
sign-up sheet for a quartet and getting a group to play two string quartets by female composers: Florence Price's String Quartet No. 1, and Valborg Aulin's String Quartet No. 1. The Price was something I had wanted to at least read through for some time, but hadn't had the chance because it's not yet public domain. The Aulin has been one of my favorite string quartets for quite a while, and I wanted to introduce people to it, so I brought the parts. One of the workshop coaches played the first violin part (stepping in because there aren't that many people who freelance on the last day), and ended up taking a picture of the first page in order to recommend as an addition to the library.

Resumed rehearsing for Sonata Day with the pianist tonight. The evening's rehearsal was actually a double rehearsal, in a sense: it was combined with the other person the pianist is performing with on Sonata Day, a cellist who is playing the third movement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. Each of us rehearsed for an hour, and acted as a sort of rehearsal coach for the other, so that we could both get some outside feedback and a little bit of time playing in front of a (very small) audience.

I think I'm very close to being ready to perform the Brahms. We've already done a lot of fine-tuning of interpretation. Some of my intonation could be more consistent, but it seems to me like we're quite well set on how we want to play the movement.

I’ve been in a bit of a musical holding pattern since performing twice in one day three weeks ago. I’m not working on any solo repertoire at the moment, just practicing orchestra music. The rehearsal schedule for my first orchestra concert this season is a bit weird: we had one rehearsal on August 19 (almost two weeks ago), and then we have both this week and next week off before we resume rehearsals on September 9. So basically we had a chance to read through all the music, and we have three solid weeks to practice it before the next rehearsal. That’s a good thing because the symphony we’re playing is hard.

Both performances went well despite some unexpected challenges. For Sonata Saturday, I didn’t have any time to warm up. I played a little before leaving home, but it was a 25-minute drive, there was a potluck lunch before the performances, and I was last on the program. For the video game concert, I found myself unexpectedly playing solo. It was supposed to be an octet, but the other violist dropped out due to illness the week of the concert. It meant I had unexpected solos when playing string quartet and string orchestra arrangements, and in the octet arrangements with two viola parts, I had to switch from Viola II to Viola I with very little practice time (and we omitted Viola II).

I’ve already posted the Sonata Saturday video. A video was taken of the entire video game concert; there was a professional-looking camera setup and a high-quality recording mic. I don’t think the video has been posted anywhere yet. I’m still keeping an eye open for it.

On Thursday I had my first lesson in almost a month, after taking three weeks off because my viola teacher got married the same day as my performances; I waited until after she was back from her honeymoon to send her the Brahms video and schedule a lesson. About half of it was spent on a detailed debrief on the Brahms (my “homework” before the lesson included coming up with at least three things I liked about the performance and at least three things I thought I could improve on), and the rest of it was getting pointers and some fingerings for orchestral music. I still need to figure out my solo repertoire plans, but this week I’m getting ensemble music under my fingers first.

The first orchestra program of the season is:

Daniel Godsil, Cathedral Grove
Johannes Brahms, Violin Concerto
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 1

Cathedral Grove is, fortunately, very straightforward. It’s contemporary (composed in 2019), but accessible. None of the notes are hard. the most difficult thing is just counting long sustained notes through tempo and meter changes. The fun thing about it is that it’s accompanied by a video of Cathedral Grove, one of the oldest redwood groves in Muir Woods. I assume we’re going to project it the video on a screen above us, which is something we’ve done before. The Brahms violin concerto really needs no introduction. It’s exciting for us not just because it’s one of the “big six” violin concertos, but also because it’s written very symphonically, with lots of juicy material for the orchestra. And finally, the Shostakovich: it’s a playful, exuberant work from his student years. It’s one of the biggest challenges we’ve taken on recently, I think, not just because of the technical difficulty of the notes but also because the texture is so transparent.

My chamber group is also going to start rehearsing around the same time for the January house concert. Right now our plan is still the first movement of the Rheinberger piano quartet. That’s also getting some individual practice time because there are some tricky double-stop passages in the viola part.

I wanted to talk about the third movement of the Hoffmeister in a little more detail, because there’s a feature of Classical performance practice that isn’t always followed today, and it definitely isn’t followed in the many student performances that can be found on YouTube.

The third movement of a concerto is traditionally in rondo form: there’s a recurring theme interspersed with contrasting episodes. The third movement of the Hoffmeister is in ABACADA form, which is very typical for the time. During the Classical era, in rondo movements, it was common for concerto soloists to play an improvised or semi-improvised “Eingang” or lead-in every time the “A” theme returns. The lead-in could be as short as a few notes, or as long as a 20-30 second mini-cadenza.

I wasn’t sure for a while whether I was going to do this myself, because I wasn’t sure how the Eingänge actually fit in. If I had heard them before, it had never been clear to me how much was written out by the composer and how much was added by the performer. Also, the examples published in an appendix to the edition I’m using were definitely more on the mini-cadenza end of the spectrum.

But then in late October I attended a university orchestra concert at Sacramento State, where the concerto on the program was a violin concerto by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. In the third movement, the soloist played short lead-ins before each recurrence of the rondo theme, much shorter than the ones that came with my copy of the Hoffmeister, so I started to have a better idea of what I wanted to do with the Hoffmeister.

I've listened to a number of recordings of the Hoffmeister. A few of them play the short lead-ins for all three repeats of the rondo theme, but a whole bunch seem to omit the first two and then play a long cadenza for the third, which now seems anachronistic to me.

Currently my plan is to write my own Eingänge for the movement. I’m thinking the first two will be short, not more than three or four measures. The third one might be longer as I have ideas for more of a mini-cadenza, but I'd still like to wrap it up in no more than about 20 seconds. Even in the recordings that play shorter lead-ins, the third one tends to be longer than the other two.

Time for some catch-up, again. I’ve now had my first two performances of 2025.

The chamber music concert was a short one with just four groups playing, because two groups pulled out due to injuries. (That doesn’t mean everyone in those groups missed out on performing, as a number of people were in two groups.) The program was:

Albert Stoessel, Suite Antique for two violins and piano, first three movements
Antonín Dvořák, Piano Trio No. 4 (“Dumky”), 3rd and 4th movements
Josef Rheinberger, Piano Quartet, 1st movement (my group)
Ernest Chausson, Piano Quartet, 2nd movement

I already posted my quartet’s performance to “Share a Video” a while ago. I've linked to professional recordings of the other pieces for anyone wants to hear the pieces that other people played. (There isn't a full recording of the Stoessel in its original form on YouTube, so I've instead linked to a version for two violins and orchestra.)

The other concert was with my orchestra, and it was a real challenge. The big piece on the program was Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which is a huge undertaking for amateur musicians on just six weeks of rehearsals. I was third chair for the concert (we rotate seating within each string section except for first stand), which means I had a number of solo lines where the score calls for 4 violas soli or 6 violas soli. I think I might have some comments later on the challenges in the viola part and how I handled them.

Also on the program was Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which I think definitely needs to be heard more often. Our guest soloist for the concerto was Er-Gene Kahng, who performed Price’s other violin concerto with us in 2019. Er-Gene probably knows more about this concerto than anyone else alive today. She was the person who edited it for publication, gave the first live performance, and made the first recording. Both of Price’s violin concertos were among the unpublished manuscripts that were misplaced after her death and rediscovered during the renovation of an abandoned house in 2009.

The concert went well, and the audience didn't riot!

And now I’m starting on both the next orchestra concert and the next quartet project.

The next orchestra concert is the last weekend of March. As we normally do in  our March concerts, we’re featuring two young soloists, this time both violin performance students at San Francisco Conservatory, but this time we have a symphony on the program instead of mostly concertos. The program is:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Overture to The Marriage of Figaro
Jenő Hubay, Carmen Fantasy
Ernest Chausson, Poème
Jean Sibelius, Symphony No. 5

The first rehearsal on that program is tonight, but I’m missing it with a bad cold, so I’ll rejoin orchestra rehearsals next week.

My quartet is staying together for the June house concert. We met twice this month to read through pieces and decide what we’re going to play next.

We sight-read the following quartets (recordings linked):

Gabriel Fauré, Piano Quartet No. 1, movements 1 and 3
Zygmunt Noskowski, Piano Quartet, movement 1
Amanda Maier, Piano Quartet, movements 1 and 2
Robert Schumann, Piano Quartet, movements 1-3
Antonín Dvořák, Piano Quartet No. 2, movement 1
Władysław Żeleński, Piano Quartet, movement 1
Joaquín Turina, Piano Quartet, movements 1 and 2

We ended up deciding to play both the first and second movements of the Turina, because two members of the group are especially enthusiastic about playing something by a Spanish composer. They’re both rather short movements, so the first two movements together total somewhere between 9 and 11 minutes, right around the 10 minute soft limit that our chamber music club has.

We decided that the first movement of the Fauré, the first movement of the Noskowski, both movements of the Maier that we read, and all three movements of the Schumann that we read are candidates for future terms. (If we play the second movement of the Schumann in the future, it would be in combination with the third movement, because it's only about 3 minutes long and the third movement is about 7 minutes.) The Fauré would probably work better for a winter concert because there’s more time to practice. The third movement of the Fauré is very playable, but we felt it doesn’t work very well on its own without other movements. We decided the Żeleński and Dvořák were probably more work than we realistically have time for.

As far as solo repertoire goes, I’m still just polishing the Hoffmeister concerto. I think I’m going to get started on the fourth movement of the Norman sonata this week. I'm most interested in performing the first or fourth movement, but I still need to discuss it with the pianist.

Sight-reading chamber music is mostly to decide what to perform next. It's definitely NOT performance-quality. We miss a lot of notes, often play slower than performance tempo, and stop and start quite a few times. But it gives us a good idea of how much individual practice and how much rehearsal time we need. We try to pick something in a difficulty range where we can prepare it thoroughly by June, but challenging enough that we don't run out of things to work on in the first month or two.

(All the recordings I've linked are professional recordings, except for the one video of my quartet's performance of Rheinberger.)

I don't memorize anything beforehand. There are simply too many notes, and it's harder to memorize music when you don't have the melody all the time. We're still playing off sheet music right up to the day we perform. Repetition makes it semi-memorized by that time, enough that we're able to pay more attention to each other than to our own sheet music.