Beethoven maybe smiling

Date: 01/23/14
Orchestra: CYO
Attendance: very good
Repertoire Rehearsed: Beethoven
Little Things I noticed: It just makes me so happy to see the orchestra get bigger and bigger. We now have a nearly complete full orchestra!! Please welcome the new members of the group! And also the video recording is helping me tremendously with the blog writing :)

Note:
With a new brass section, and four cellos, and a bunch of talented youngsters playing Egmont, I'm sure Beethoven is smiling in his grave. He might even lend us some super powers.

And since we have a newly formed "brass section" now (including the saxophones who were part of the woodwinds before), I moved the seats around a bit, but I'm not too settled on the current seating, so we will probably need to do some more relocations in the near future. I want to try to find the best seating situation for our purpose.

We had Mr. Lin lead violin sectionals while I led the rest of the orchestra during the first half of the rehearsal. I now think that doing sectionals in smaller groups (such as per instrument), might be beneficial. I just need to figure out how I can do that effectively in terms of logistics.

We finally went through the ENTIRE Egmont Overture (and this was only our third rehearsal of the piece!)! That is a huge accomplishment in itself. I hope you guys are feeling somewhat proud of yourselves. When you have a larger goal, it is very easy to forget to appreciate your efforts in achieving smaller goals, but please don't forget, without accomplishing the smaller ones, we can never get to the big one. So try to really cherish the small things you accomplished and use that as motivation to get to the next step!

At this point, I think a couple of things need to happen as the next step. One is the obvious, being a little more physically comfortable with playing the notes you have in front of you. When you are physically comfortable, you are in control of the notes. When you have the control, then you have flexibility in terms of what you can do with the notes and play them however you want to, and whatever way you desire to play them - you'll have control over the timing, intonation, articulation, dynamics, and color, and you'll have the ability to adjust and fine-tune each of those aspects per note. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?

The second is to get to know the very piece better. So please keep listening to a recording of this piece many many times. You can never listen to it too many times. The more you listen, the more you discover, and the more you know, well, the better you play. If you don't have a cd, or mp3 file, you can always come back to this blog and go to the entry where I posted a link to a youtube video of the piece :)