Author Archives: flutietoot

Day 49 – November 18th – Frustration

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My frustrations from yesterday’s warm-up session carried over into my practice today. While I realised this from the first few minutes, I didn’t do much about it in the morning practice sessions, and so was probably wasting my time playing things over and over again when I should have thought of a more intelligent solution.

Later in the day I managed to get back on track, and really tried to cement some of the sequences that I’ve been struggling with. I decided that the only way to get them right under pressure is to play them with the metronome at increasing speeds, and so spent a good half a hour on that. Though they were better in yesterday’s class, there is still quite a way to go.

As for Reichert Nos 2 and 4, these were the exercises I was getting particularly frustrated over. Though I have been playing them almost daily, I still can neither play the yucky keys (Ab maj, F min, Db maj, Bb min, F# maj, D#min) from memory nor at the speeds required in class. After my unproductive hour this morning, I’ve decided that I have to work on memory and speed separately, for the moment prioritising speed, or else I’m going to get nowhere.

Tomorrow we have a special class on accompanied pieces with Juliet Edwards, for which I’m playing the first two movements of the Poulenc Sonata. I’ve still got a bit of work to do with the piano score tonight, but am feeling pretty confident with the flute part. Hopefully I’ve thought about it expressively enough.

I’m currently doing one of my listening projects for the week, and have selected the CD The Ocarina is No Trombone. Very tongue-in-cheek, it’s a collection of ‘virtuoso ocarina’ arrangements of popular tunes, and is good fun to listen to! La Dona e Mobile for ocarina and accordion, a veritable orchestra of them playing Offenbach’s Can-Can, it’s a good antidote for the frustrations of earlier.

Day 48 – November 17th – Indian and the Force of Destiny

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Today was a long one, and we’ve just got back from Trevor’s. The plan was class and then take-away from the local Indian restaurant in Wye, and this gave Trevor licence to make the day’s class a very long one indeed!

My playing today wasn’t the best. Despite having done a lot of work on sequences over the weekend, I got rather flustered about some of the other warm-up exercises, and so have now been issued with a wad of sight-reading practice along with everything else! I suppose I have to keep look at it in the long term, and at how it’s all contributing to being a good player at the end of these six months.

As for Andersen No. 6, I wasn’t playing grace note short enough, nor (a worse crime) the turns exactly on the second half of the beat. Whoops! Looks like I’m doing a bit more work on that one for next week. Trevor made a very interesting comment about my playing though today – he said that working with me is like trying to build a wall, but when he tries to put another brick on then one lower down often falls out. So essentially, if I try fixing something with my playing, it’s usually at the expense of something else. So the challenge for future lessons is to try and improve while maintaining all the work that I’ve already done.

As for the Indian, I really enjoyed it. Trevor and Dot were kind enough to provide some nice beer, and with it the conversation flowed a little more easily between everyone. After dinner, we watched the second part of the French film Jean de Florette, which was both a wonderful story and stunningly shot in Provence. The theme tune – played by Gerard Dépardieu in the first part on his harmonica – is the theme from Verdi’s opera The Force of Destiny. I feel like it could be stuck in my head for a while!

Day 47 – November 16th – Sequences

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I’m still struggling to memorise the sequences that Trevor proposes in our warm-ups, and so today played them in each of my hours of technique practice. Hopefully the focus will make them stick a bit more, because I’m a bit sick of getting flustered in class as soon as the tempo goes up at notch. On the other hand (as I was reminded by a friend in Australia the other day), it’s not about learning it all right this minute, but about the improvement – if I can play them a bit faster in class tomorrow then I’m getting somewhere!

This week’s etudes are something of a mixed bag. I’ve done a lot of work on Andersen No. 6 before, and ended up winning the open study section of the Lesile Barklamb Scholarship (Victorian Flute Guild) with it in 2011. I feel like it’s come back together relatively easily over the past few days, but that Trevor will have a lot to say about ornaments, trills and expression. I’ve been trying to play grace notes and mordants as fast as possible, and to make sure that all dynamics are observed. After last week comments, I’ve also spent some time thinking about the large-scale picture, of harmonic direction and the overall structure of the piece.

I am, however, finding the Altès studies less appealing. I was asked to repeat the central section of No. 5 at the correct speed, which hasn’t been too difficult to achieve. Moving on to No. 6, and I can play both the articulation patterns, just not for three pages at the given speed! No. 7 is a similar story. I’ve been trying not to get too frustrated with these studies, and to embrace the challenge of maintaining the clarity of articulation, but definitely find them less appealing to practise than the Andersen.

Today I had my first experiment with the slow cooker, and was really happy with the result. Leftover sweet potatoes, cabbage, parsnips with veggie stock and some herbs came out five hours later tasting absolutely fantastic!

Day 46 – November 15th – Wibb masterclass reflections

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After such a busy day yesterday, it was good to get back to practice and let some of Wibb’s comments and ideas from the masterclass sink in. For some reason, I found that I got a lot more out of this masterclass than the last one we attended – maybe I was a bit better prepared for Wibb’s teaching style this time? Here, in summary, are a few of the key points that I took away:

– The flute is like a voice, and Wibb tends to express things in vocal terms when talking about both rhythm and tone. Almost every key phrase was given a set of lyrics, which helped to guide the performer’s emphasis or encourage them to correctly show the meter. There were also a couple of favourites that kept cropping up: “el-e-phant” for triplets, and then “el-e-phant’s bum” for a triplet followed by a less-important crotchet. For tone, the performers were asked to sing a phrase “like a baritone” or “like a soprano”, which showed how different vibrato and tonal concepts can give us such a huge palette of colours to play with.

– A Moyse quote, related by Wibb in a lovely French accent: “syncop take accent”

– I was impressed by how Wibb managed to related everything back to either Moyse’s De la Sonorité or his 24 Melodic Studies. The exercise would always start out simply, gradually adding steps so as to arrive at the sort of phrase he had found in the piece. It really did bring home to me just how fundamental expressive phrasing is, and prompted me to practice my tunes with renewed awareness this morning.

– Love final notes in phrases, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that vibrato is needed.

– Composers, even really good ones, often make mistakes with slurs. The phrase is always more important than slur marks, and so we should edit in a way that bring out the melody rather than always trying to respect every single marking on the page.

Hopefully I’ll be able to incorporate some of this wisdom into my practice in the coming days.

Flute and Piano Recital – Wissam Boustany and Aleksander Szram

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Friday 14th November, St Mary’s Church on Paddington Green, London
Chamber Music in Little Venice series

I came to this recital with a very good idea of what I’d be focusing on for the entire evening, and thankfully was proved totally wrong. Both flautist Wissam Boustany and pianist Aleksander Szram make a big deal of the fact that they perform from memory, to the point of it becoming a bit of a calling card for them. While I’m still not sure that it needs to be a key point in one’s biography, I was pleasantly surprise that the memory aspect didn’t dominate my concert experience. Far from it – though the memorisation of such a program is amazing, the music was the most amazing part, as it should be!

Boustany chose a challenging program, featuring both the hair-raising Ballade by Frank Martin and Bohuslav Martinu’s Sonata No. 1. These were stunning performances, with the clarity of bell-like high notes in the final movement of the Martinu a particular highlight. Boustany’s sense of melodic arc was apparent throughout, and while the storytelling was often aided quite a lot by his eyebrows, the sound nevertheless soared in the small church. For the most part delicately phrased and showing keen ensemble with Szram, the opening Sonata in Bb major by Beethoven felt at times to be something of a warm-up, as Boustany’s high notes were somewhat strained.

However, the stand-out pieces on this program were not the standards but the less well-known works. Boustany’s own composition – Broken Child for flute and piano – showed strong Middle-Eastern influences in its musical language and was utterly compelling. Deeply mournful, the flute was used to draw out rich tone colours with beautifully subtle inflections of sound. For the recital’s final work, the duo were joined by violist Karen Norlén to perform Maurice Duruflé’s Prélude, Récitatif et Variations Op.3. This is a gem of twentieth-century chamber music, and it was a pleasure to her such a thoughtful, compelling rendition. The Récitatif theme was beautiful in its simplicity, and Norlén’s rich tone added an wonderful depth to the performance.