introspection and exploration

I think that there’s a link between looking within and looking without that isn’t often explored. I think I’m a case in point right now. The OSO’s season is in its last phase, we’re doing some youth concerts and a community concert in Estacada over the next two days, and then we gather again at the Schnitz to begin rehearsals on Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), which will be a major undertaking.

Before this, we’ve been on a run of three straight classical subscription concerts with major pieces on each of them – including the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra, Brahms Second Piano Concerto, Shostakovich Eighth Symphony and Debussy’s Jeux, among others.

For me, on top of all of this, I gave a major recital at the beginning of April and then prepared for and went up to Seattle to take the audition for their Assistant principal viola opening.

I’m now at the point where I desperately want to put the viola away for a couple weeks and do some serious Netflix activity, but I can’t – I’ve got Harvey Rosencrantz Orchestra performances with Pink Martini next Tuesday and Wednesday, and then in mid-June when we go to Carnegie Hall.

Then I have teaching and performing at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute at the end of June/July, including a premiere of a new oboe quartet by Daniel Ott with my old friend Erin Gustafson on oboe. This will be great, but the thought of keeping my playing ‘on’ is verging on the excruciating. I can hardly wait for July 6th – at that point I’ll be done for a month, and it will be nice to downshift and take some time off.

Ok – that’s the background – so on to the intro/extro paradox I started off with. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the audition – I’m happy that it went as well as it did, but I’m a perfectionist and I think I could have and should have done better, and my mind just won’t let go of it. I keep thinking about the excerpts that I could have practiced more carefully or the intonation work that I should have done…

It’s not productive or helpful thinking (I can hear my therapist I my head right now) in this way, but it’s part of being a musician. On the other hand, I have a student that will be starting the Walton Concerto, and it will be fun to go over the part and check fingerings and bowings before I give them to him to copy into his part. It’s a major concerto, one of the cornerstones of the viola repertoire, and a big step for him. It will be a fun piece to teach. I’m also pulling out the Bloch Suite for Viola and Piano (1919) which is a sprawing 40 minute piece that plays like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a happy ending. I haven’t played this since performing it at the Bloch Festival back in 1996, and before that at my senior recital in undergrad. My part has all sorts of markings that go back to my first serious work and study as a violist, and it makes me think of how far I’ve come.

With these old chestnuts coming my way, it makes me think about what has been for me, and then it makes me think of what will be. I just bought the Emerson Quartet performing the quartets and piano quintet of Brahms (with Leon Fleischer, pianist), and these are works which I haven’t done before, and very much would like to do. In addition, I was looking through my CD collection and found a disc that I’ve never listened to before, but must have bought on a whim a long time ago. It’s also a Brahms disc, this time a collection of his late piano music performed by Wilhelm Kempff. I’ve been fascinated by writings that I’ve happened across concerning his Intermezzi op. 117 and his Klavierstücke op. 118-119. It will be a journey of discovery to take a long look at these great works and see how they influence my thinking on the two viola (clarinet) sonatas op. 120. In this regard, my looking inward forces me to look outwards towards the new – my lingering on the past allowing me to turn and focus on the future, and the unknown.

I guess it is Spring, after all.