Normally, the life of a professional symphonic musician is fairly low-key and predictable. You know what you’re going to be playing and when it’s going to be played a year ahead of time. You get your parts several weeks in advance and you judge when you’re going to start practicing them and how much time it will take. Sometimes you can stroll into rehearsal with just a cursory glance at the parts (when you’ve played the pieces before), and sometimes it involves a day-after-day grind of working a particularly difficult piece or program for a couple weeks before the first rehearsal.
For some reason, I choose to regularly add to my staid workload. Much of this involves the Arnica Quartet, and then I work on some solo repertoire as well. Right now, I’ve loaded a lot on my plate, for some reason.
I’ve got a chamber concert up in Seattle in March that will involve the Saint-Saëns Piano Quartet and the Vieuxtemps Elegy for viola and piano. In April, there’s quartet repertoire, including two very demanding works: the formidable Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartòk and the incredible A minor Quartet, op. 13 of Mendelssohn (in honor of his bicentenary, I suppose). I’m also learning the Paganini La Campanella (transcribed from the violin version), taking the Brahms Clarinet Trio back out of the cabinet for another spin, and am choosing other repertoire for a late-Spring recital program. It’s starting to add up!
Fortunately, there is some time off next week to really get some quality practice time in!