surviving gala night

Thursday night was our opening season gala special, featuring violinist Joshua Bell.  It was an unusual concert in several ways, not the least of which was the rehearsal period that led up to it.  Usually, when we rehearse for a classical series concert, we start with one rehearsal on Tuesday, have a day off on Wednesday, play two rehearsals on Thursday, one on Friday, and the dress on Saturday morning, with the first concert on Saturday night.  In this case, we had a rehearsal on Monday, a double on Tuesday, Wednesday was off, and on what would have been the dress rehearsal we just worked on the Lalo Symphonie Espagnole with Josh Bell.  So we basically hadn’t played the majority of the rep on the program since Tuesday.  Pretty unprecedented for us.  Sometimes we have a dress rehearsal the day before the concert, which is fine, but to have an entire empty day made for some interesting butterflies in my stomach.  When you add in the fact that the Nielsen Maskarade overture is very difficult and completely unknown to the orchestra – and it opens the concert cold – and that the Lalo is not a standard rep. accompaniment piece for us, it makes the evening interesting.  Fortunately everything went pretty well.  Josh played the crap out of the Lalo (which he’ll be playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra soon) and we acquitted ourselves well in the rest of the program.  I even played my solo in the Enescu without causing myself embarrassment – score! (Principal violist Joël Belgique is out for two programs on paternity leave, helping out his wife, OSO violinist Inés Voglar with their new arrival son, Alejandro Matias Belgique.)