String Quartet Seminar.

Tanglewood has officially begun. During the first week I will only be concerned with the String Quartet Seminar: most of the string players are assigned a quartet and you learn two pieces. This year everyone learns a Mozart and a Shostakovich...I have Shosti 14, which was dedicated to the cellist of the Beethoven Quartet (translation: lots of cello stuff). We had our first coaching today with Joel Krosnick (who we will have all week) and it was really great! He just recorded the Shostakovich Quartets with the Juilliard Quartet so he had so much information just ready to go. I am very interested to here their recording now, since he talked to so much about what kinds of moods and characters he was thinking about when playing it...so interesting!! I had never known anything about him before, except that lots of people want to study with him...and now I know why! If only I hadn't been rejected from Juilliard (although I wouldn't have studied with him if I had been accepted...oh well!). The schedule for this week plays like a typical CCE one: rehearsal from 10-12...then lunch...free period after lunch (my group rehearsed rather than taking a break) then back to back coachings from 3:00-5:45. I have realized that I really do enjoy being super busy. During the yoga retreat we had to write done 10 things we love about being a musician and 10 things we hate about being a musician...I put extremely busy schedule under the things I love...is that strange? My group is pretty fun...one current Rice violinist, one recently graduated Rice violinist, and a violist from Yale (who I met at New York String Seminar two years ago!). The Shostakovich is going surprisingly well...the Mozart Adagio and Fugue is much much trickier and will require more careful rehearsal. But things are going well so far!! Yay!

Tags: Tanglewood, Joel Krosnick, Mozart, CCE, Shostakovich