Hi everyone,

Thank you so much for all your hard work and wonderful, collaborative attitudes in rehearsal. It is such a delight to work with you – in fact, it is the highlight of my week!

Here is the plan for the run up to the concert. It isn’t carved in stone but should give you a good idea of what I’m hoping to do:

7

3 May

West Side Story (WSS) : Somewhere, Scherzo, Cha Cha, Meeting Scene
—
Gershwin:  B section – Fig 45 – bar 584 (Moderato con grazia)

8

10 May

Gershwin: B section completed + read through A’ (Moderato con grazia to end)
—
Mendelssohn: Recapitulation to end (bar 394 to end). Run through the whole piece.

9

17 May

WSS: Finale, Mambo
Batman: Up the Cathedral
—
Gershwin: A’ (Moderato con grazia to end)
?Mendelssohn: if time

10

24 May

All repertoire: Focus on transitions, character, and overall shape. Become aware of how stamina factors into the performance.

11

31 May

‘General’ rehearsal: Run whole program then final clean-up of any messy bits.

Program needs to be 100% concert-ready by today.

General

1 June

Balancing rehearsal: Getting used to performance venue and any changes to dynamics, articulation and balance that might be needed for the concert.

As I said at the start of the year, I’ll be treating these rehearsals like a professional orchestra rehearsal period. What that means for you is it is expected that you have practiced everything before we get to rehearsal. Just like you need to tune before the rehearsal so that the tuning A is about us coming together as an ensemble, practicing notes, rhythms, dynamics, and articulation is up to you and the rehearsals are about putting it together.

I know you are all very busy, so here are some tips on efficient practicing so you don’t get overloaded and stressed:

  1. Follow your part as you listen to a recording.
  2. Run through your part (the whole thing, or in chunks), make a note of all the tricky bits and work through those only. Then link them up with the surrounding sections so that it flows.
  3. If there is a very technically difficult part, make up a technical exercise to practice away from the piece. This will stop your brain tensing up when it sees the tricky bit in the music,
  4. When practicing these tricky bits, simplify it so you have more control. eg. just practice the rhythm, or the fingering sequence, or on one note/one string only, or bow it out, play it slower etc etc. then add the components back together.
  5. 10 minutes of mindful, deliberate practice is better than 1 hour of mindless repetitions.
  6. Practice with and without a metronome.
  7. Practice with and without a tuner (winds and brass).
  8. Play along with a recording (just check the orchestra also tunes to A=441. Some tune much higher).
  9. Watch a YouTube of an orchestra performing and pay attention to all the other parts that are going on, not just your part.

Please do you best to keep our program simmering away in the background while you do other things so that we can virtually pick up where we left off in May. 10 minutes per day will do wonders!

Enjoy April and see you all in May!

Jen