Concerto thoughts, performance prep, and Romanticism
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
Sorry there wasn’t a post last week! While I’m in “just make it through the week” mode, I had managed to set aside some time to write my weekly newsletter, and then on Friday I ended up spending hours combing through an orchestral score at the piano and that pretty much destroyed my ability to do any other productive work.
Score-reading is really not my strong suit and has a way of making me feel really resentful toward certain members of the brass family, and also violas. Trumpets and French horns, why can’t YOU just play the notes the way they’re written instead of making ME transpose on the fly??? Violas, what makes you so special that you need your own special clef??? God, get over yourselves.
(I honestly have no idea how conductors and those special breeds of pianist who can just sight-read orchestral scores at the keyboard do it. I realize now that this is exactly how the vocalists and treble-staff-only instrumentalists felt when we all had to write four-part chorales in Theory I, and I wasn’t terribly sympathetic then. Look ma, character growth.)
Anyway, onward!