Can you tell I'm a big fan of ICanHasCheezburger?My orchestra conductor looks nothing like this little guy, but he did ask for more volume from the string section from time to time this past weekend. We performed Mendelssohn's Elijah with a community chorus and a handful of soloists, and even though the audience was not as full as I would have liked, they seemed to really appreciate the concert.
As always, it was a treat to perform with the orchestra even though the horn section wasn't the focus. We did what we could to make ourselves known. I've mentioned this before, but when I first started playing with the group back when I was a complete novice, I would judge my personal performance with percentages. At the end of a concert, I would evaluate my playing and say, "well, at least I played 68% of the thing correctly." Sometimes I would be able to give myself an 80% rating or even a 90%. I'm not sure how I would judge my playing this time around—I could have been more accurate when aiming for random pitches, and once or twice I got lost in counting long stretches of rests with half a dozen tempo variations in the middle of them, but I didn't fall on my face. So, you know.
During one of the rehearsals, we noticed the chorus members were all wearing name tags. One of them said that was because they didn't all know each other and just wanted to be friendly. We in the brass section noted the clear distinction between the two groups—in the orchestra, we said, we don't care who the other people are. If we want to know someone's name, we'll look it up in the program.
Next up in April is a Wagner piece and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2. Come see.
Comments
I like the Can has cheezburger stuff too. Silly kitties.