Recital Prep

Those of you who are keeping track know that my masters recital is coming up this Saturday. I don't know why nobody told me that a mostly Carter program would really hard to keep up. But for future reference, it is. I'm mainly just going through stuff slowly making sure my hands really know what they are doing...because there are a lot of (pretty hard) notes to play...like all the time. Yikes.

So, if you are in the area you should stop by Duncan Recital Hall on the Rice University Campus at 3pm on Saturday January 26th for a fun show featuring:

1. A New Piece by Jairo Duarte-Lopez called Ekphrasis sobre "El Miedo" de Tanguy.
2. Both of the Carter Figments for Solo Cello (#1: for cello alone, #2 Remembering Mr. Ives)
3. Enchanted Preludes for Flute and Cello (also by Carter and featuring the spectacular Hilary Abigana)
4. The Carter Sonata for Cello and Piano (with the show-stopping Patti Wolf)

The Week in O(h)M(y)T(rill)

1. Rehearsals begin for the Ligeti Cello Concerto (with Chrissy Kim as soloist!)...I'm playing the orchestra part. The first time I played it was my first Musica Nova concert at Eastman (with the very scary Secret Theatre on the program!)
2. Rehearsing with Patti almost everyday (always a joy!) on the Carter Sonata.
3. Practicing like hell for my recital.
4. Lots of teaching as stuff (as always).
5. Lindsay Kesselman's vocal recital (I'm playing How I Hate This Room by her dad!)
6. Return to orchestra rehearsals with Larry...we've had a pretty easy schedule lately.
7. Norman Fischer Studio Recital on Friday night...I'm not playing for once, although I wanted to. Oh well.
8. My parents come into town on Friday and stay for the weekend!
9. Morgen comes into town on Saturday, auditions on Monday and leaves on Tuesday!
10. (my masters recital saturday at 3pm in duncan recital hall)
11. Elliott Carter.

Round 3

I had kind of planned on not going back, but it seems that life had other plans for me and in the past few days decisions were changed and I will be going back to Tanglewood for a third summer. Highlights of the summer include:

1. Dvorak 9 with James Levine.
2. Alpine Symphony with Bernard Haitink.
3. MASSIVE Carter 100th Bday celebration featuring two orchestra concerts (with only music by Carter conducted by James Levine and Oliver Knussen plus the cello concerto with Fred Sherry as soloist) and tons of Carter Chamber Music...all with the big man himself in attendance.
4. Eugen Onegin with James Levine starring Renee Fleming.
5. Fun in general.

Preview Passed, No Rochester

In case you were wondering, I did in fact pass my preview. Things seemed a little shaky to me, but I pulled through in the end somehow. And they actually liked the enchanted preludes. Imagine that.

I was going to be in Rochester next weekend to record Jario's piece...but it turns out that he is having visa troubles in Colombia and may not be back in the states for up to two months!!! He called the competition people and they don't really need the recording until May so it looks like we will be postponing it for a while. I was looking forward to going to Rochester and seeing everyone and having a lesson with Kathy Kemp (for the upcoming Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra audition) oh well...

Things are a little depressing around Rice....mainly because of this. Its a really small school so everybody knew her, even if you weren't great friends. She lived in my apartment building too. Sigh...

Fixed

My computer is back up and running!!! Yay!!!! For those of you who are keeping track, my hard drive died for no reason whatsoever...this makes me very sad and kind of angry. I thought that Macs never ever had any problems, but mine did and I lost everything on my hard drive! After several trips to the Apple Store at the Galleria and to Best Buy and to Fry's Electronics several hard drives were purchased and returned and installed and removed and installed wrong and removed and installed and now everything is working...yay!!!

At least Heather is here to keep me company and provide moral support and at least I have an iPhone to keep me connected to everything!

Nervous Breakdown?

I just got back from Mexico this evening...due to an unfortunate/fortunate series of circumstances the next few days in my life are going to be some of the craziest ever I think. My recital preview is this Tuesday, so I need to bring back all of my Carter Shit to working order (plus brush up on Jairo's Piece which I'm recording in a few weeks??? maybe?) and learn Plylar's Piece (which he says is quite difficult)...all before Tuesday. I also need to be entertaining Heather the entire time (which will be a joy...of course)...it just makes things a bit trickier...but maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion and it actually won't be that bad? I guess I'll find out soon enough. Things I'll be doing with Heather:

1. Hanging out and having fun.
2. Going to the Rothko Chapel and Menil Gallery (I've never been..oops)
3. Going to the Galleria.
4. Having a reading party?
5. Eating at good food establishments like House of Pies.
6. Going out to other fun places. Duh.

I canceled my teaching on Monday to make sure I could fit everything in. I don't want to look like an idiot at my preview so I really need to do some quality practicing. Starting a few weeks ago, oops. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself, I did have everything ready to go before break. Whatever, now I'm just rambling and typing out my crazy thought process and publishing it online. That's stupid.

I'll have more to say about Mexico later. Maybe.