Sixty-four pages of score

This has been a concert-filled weekend. On Friday night Jean-Yves played a recital at the department on harpsichord. As usual, he programmed way too much music, and one of the French suites in the first movement could have happily fallen by the wayside and not been missed. But otherwise it was lovely. Since he played on the faculty recital in September, he has been taking lessons in dealing with performance-related anxiety from a rather famous personnage in Montreal, whom people from all over the world travel great distances to consult with relation to this sometimes-incapacitating problem. It has helped J-Y immensely. He seemed very relaxed on stage, spoke engagingly to the audience in both official languages, and played very well. He has his audition next week at McGill for the doctoral programme, and we all wish him luck.

Last night Hubby and I attended the symphony. The soloist performed Strauss� Concerto for horn No. 1, in E flat major, op. 11, and was marvellous. Unfortunately this is not one of old Richard�s best compositions, sounding a little too much like neo-Mozart, and not the romantic that Strauss really was. They also played Beethoven�s fourth symphony, which was really very nice. You can�t go wrong with Ludwig van, and the 4th is a piece not heard very often in concert. In his programme notes from the stage, St�phane said that it is like a petite Greek girl between two big Norsemen, referring to the 3rd and 5th symphonies, which are truly heavyweights.

This morning I finished copying the score for Hubby�s piece and he has left me a pile of corrections to make. I am not so anxious to get started, since I know I made a lot of mistakes and, worse, there are inconsistencies in the notation of the percussion parts and brass split-staves. The latter will especially entail massive reformatting of those pages in question, which is quite a few at the beginning of the piece. I feel about corrections the way I do about altering garments: I would rather sew a pair of pants from scratch then have to replace a zipper later in its life. �and speaking of pants, Hubby and I had fully intended to wear our new leather trousers to the concert last night, but we have been so busy that I never got around to shortening them. So, they will have to wait for another occasion.

|

<~~~ * ~~~>