CyndieZ said
I am really enjoying reading this thread - keep sharing everyone!

I'm hoping to join my first orchestra in the spring. There are two within traveling distance for me. My gut is telling me that one does more challenging music, but I'm going to try to go to a couple of their performances to see if I'm correct. I'd like to ease in to the orchestral experience by joining the who's rep is less challenging. I still call myself a beginner (well maybe adv. beginner), but my teacher tells me I am an intermediate player. 

I've been taking a Chamber Ensemble class to get experience playing as part of an ensemble, and I'm hoping that will help. 

Excited at the prospect of joining, and a little nervous too!

Cyndie

  

Let us know how it goes! Have you had a chance to talk with anyone about the two orchestras? Local musicians, teachers or even luthiers can often give you some insight into what to expect, even if they don't play in those orchestras. It's always nice to have some advance information, given the amount of variation in how community orchestras operate. Another thing you can do if you have the time and inclination: maybe contact the conductors and see if they'd mind you sitting in on a rehearsal.

Gordon Shumway said
Although we have fixed upon Sibelius, Puccini and Karlowicz for our Xmas gig, we are still sight-reading stuff for the hell of it. This was last Friday's torture (3rd movmt of John Ireland's Concertino Pastorale): -

  

I found the Ireland Concertino Pastorale on YouTube. I like it. And I've considered Karlowicz to be a very underrated composer for quite a while.

As for how my season's going...

I've cut back to just one orchestra, the semi-pro orchestra, because of my ongoing shoulder injury. (That means I won't be playing Beethoven's 6th with the mid-level community orchestra I normally also play in. Which is actually fine with me, because it would have been my fourth time playing it within three years.)

I'm still crossing a piece off my musical bucket list this weekend: the Brahms German Requiem. It'll be my third concert this fall. The Brahms needs no introduction. The piece that opens the program is a quite fascinating contemporary piece based on whale song, "Alice" by Qing Yang. Our performance will be the US premiere, and we'll have the composer singing the solo soprano part in her own piece.

After this weekend, I'm sitting out of orchestras for the rest of the month, playing a Messiah sing-along in December (which will be on just one rehearsal), and then resuming in late January with rehearsals for Bruckner's 7th and the Clara Schumann piano concerto (concert February 22).

As for playing the same stuff repeatedly... sometimes I wish conductors in the same area would talk to each other and avoid programming the same stuff around the same time. Last year, I was playing Beethoven's 8th in two different orchestras at the same time -- one in a "classical" interpretation at the upper end of the range of recorded tempi, and one in a "romantic" interpretation at the lower end of the tempo range. The performances were two weeks apart. In the really extreme case, a few years ago, Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony was performed by every single orchestra in my area capable of playing it (six orchestras in all including professional, university, and semi-pro/amateur orchestras) in the space of five weeks, because none of the conductors noticed that all the others were playing it at the same time. That's not great for audiences either.

Just so people who are not as far along don't get intimidated by the Sibelius Andante Festivo: there are community orchestras that play mostly easier stuff than that. The Sibelius is at the easy end for pieces in their original form, but some community orchestras accept near-beginners and play a lot of simplified arrangements (the kind of stuff that gets arranged for school orchestras). And there is an increasing number of adult beginners' orchestras that only accept beginner to early intermediate learners -- in fact there are now two of those in my area.

Beginners' orchestras tend to be run by a string teacher (whereas other orchestras' conductors may or may not be string players at all), and usually have very long rehearsal cycles, so I would think focusing on the notes to the detriment of technique isn't as much of a concern.

I do think playing in an orchestra with people above your level is a double-edged sword: you can get a lot of technical tips from other people, and you get a good idea of what techniques you need to learn, but at the same time I would agree that it's easy to focus too much on just playing the notes, especially if the rehearsal cycle is too short. Usually, stronger orchestras tend to have fewer rehearsals per concert.

cid said
Ok, I have a question. Somewhere I read something about “faking” it in section where you have issues playing that section. Exactly how do you do that? I am not going to be doing it because I am not playing in groups, but I am trying to picture it.

I would assume you have to keep bowing in the proper up bow and down bow pattern to keep in sync with those in your area. How do you do that without accidentally hitting the strings and making an off-note sound? Even holding the bow away from the strings while pretending to bow would have issues with hitting the strings. 

How do you ever manage to join back in smoothly? Actually, how do you actually start faking it smoothly?

  

There are two situations where you may need to fake.

One is in fast passages where you can't play all the notes quickly enough. There the answer is usually to try to play some of the notes but not all of them. People are playing short bows anyway, and the audience doesn't really see individual bows in the orchestra very clearly. What this means is: you can get away with just playing the first note of every beat and then retaking in time for the next beat.

In slower passages, the more likely reason you'd be faking is getting lost. If you get lost in a slower passage, hold the bow off the string, pretend to bow (it's easier when the bow is moving slowly), and listen to the rest of the orchestra until you know where you are and join in.