Jennifer Grucza

The day of the concert I decided I just could not stand my new A string. I swear it must be a mislabeled D string. Maybe I should send it back for a refund, like Angus suggested. Maybe if it were as expensive as a cello string, I would. Anyway, I took the awful A string off my viola after our 3pm rehearsal (the concert was at 8pm), and put my old A string back on. Much better!

At the concert, I sat in the audience with my sister, her boyfriend, and Angus for the first piece, the Mozart trio. It sounded very nice, though I couldn’t hear Marcus (on viola) as much as I would have liked to. It’s hard for a viola to compete with a piano (full stick) and clarinet, even with your instrument pointed the right direction (instead of away from the audience like we normally have to do).

I didn’t hear the second piece, the Harbison, because I felt the need to go downstairs to warm up and practice a little bit more.

It was funny, for whatever reason there are only five nice black chairs in Kresge (you know, the nice padded ones that sit higher than most chairs), so three of us had to use the stupid old brown folding chairs they use for orchestra. And guess what, I was one of the three! That’s ok, though, I didn’t even notice until people pointed that out to me after the concert. It was just as well, anyway, since I was the tallest player.

At to the performance itself, well, I think it went pretty well. No big train wrecks or anything–it pretty much hung together. I’m afraid I messed up the very end of my fugue entrance in the last movement–that’s what comes of thinking of different fingerings too close to the concert. Anyway, maybe it wasn’t too noticeable. It’s easy to focus just on your mistakes. I do think I did well on the little third movement richochet-filled solo. And we did a pretty good job with the tempo in the second movement (in keeping it from fluctuating too widely, but still sounding musical). There were some nice moments throughout. It will be interesting to hear the recording, of course. Too bad I’ll have to wait a while for that.

Next concert is May 10th!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 at 12:29 am and is filed under Classical Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.