I woke up to the first rainy day in a long time here in Italy. But that's ok because I knew it was going to be an inside day, rain or shine. I was almost glad for the rain.
It was a very busy day today for music. All three of my performance groups met. Luckily the easiest and the least challenging one met first. It gave me time to get the fingers limbered up, stretched and ready to play the tough stuff.
The next two sessions were a tremendous amount of work but I believe I made some real progress in my chamber music playing. We are getting to the point where we are turning notes into real music. There was a lot of extremely technical criticism that was offered by the coaches. I was worried that my lack of experience was holding back some of the very experienced players, including one of the ivy-league student musicians. But he was receiving almost as much advice as I was.
One of bit of advice that was offered was a change in some of the fingerings of a particularly tough passage that I just could not get to sound properly. Correct fingerings means literally choosing which fingers will play which notes and marking the musical score to insure it is played properly. It is important in the "ergonomics" of playing to enable a pianist to play musical phrases, bring out a melody, accent one note over another, or to position the hand to be in the right place on the keyboard at the right time in order to play very fast passages with the least amount of wrist or forearm motion. Changing the fingerings that I had practiced for a month meant relearning portions of the music. After our coaching session, there was little time for the pool today. It meant practicing to prepare the music for tomorrow's session. I may need to live with these changes another day or so before they set in.
During a free hour, I was invited by one of the Israeli participants, a clarinetist, to play an arrangement of Georg Fredrich Handel pieces for clarinet and piano. It was a good time. I video recorded a portion of the session and will post it here if I have any success downloading it onto YouTube.
From the nearly thirty works being prepared here, some will be chosen to be included in the public concert this Friday night. I was told by one participant today that every person who wants to perform will be included in the concert.
I am going to try to download the video I took. I have posted my blog tonight and I will return to it with the video when I manage to download it.
Good night for now.
P.S. Here is the link to the hotel and center I am staying in.
http://www.hotelgrazia.it/
