Day 109 – January 17th – Sleet

I had rather hoped to wake up this morning with even a little bit of snow on the ground, but it was just icy and rather grey. Instead, we had half an hour of sleet in the afternoon. Great clumps of soggy wetness that turned to water as soon as they hit the ground. At least it was fun to watch – from inside, snuggled up in my over-sized woolly jumper with a cup of tea!

My painstaking efforts with the Bach E minor sonata are definitely starting to pay off – I’m almost there with memorising the first movement! While it in itself doesn’t seem like much, thinking through all the exercises that I’ve committed to memory over the last three and a half months does make me feel like I’ve achieved quite a bit. The Maquarre exercises are also coming from memory, and I made it through to D minor without glancing at the music this morning. After spending quite a bit of time in flat key territory with them (starting at the top of the page, it works through from C major in descending 5ths), I was really excited to find that the tail end of the circle from A major to E minor felt very easy.

Trevor cancelled our walk again this evening, but my proposal of chamber music was finally taken up and I walked over to the Old Dairy to play quartets with the girls there. We read through some lovely Schmitt, an arrangement of Chopin piano preludes (nice melodies, but my 3rd flute part was rather dull), Ravel’s Pièce en forme d’Habanera for four flutes, and then ended up once again with the Furstenau Op. 88 quartet that we read last time.

I love the last movement of this piece, which is variations on Deutschlandlied (the German national anthem). I can’t find any recordings of the flute quartet on youtube, but there are several of the tune in its original and arguably more pleasing form. It was originally written by Haydn as the slow movement of his Op.76, No. 3 string quartet, the ‘Emperor’. This is a recording of the wonderful Takacs quartet, and though the slow movement starts at 9:35, I’ve just very happily listened to the whole thing through twice!

Day 102 – January 10th – Memory and Maquarre

In many ways today was very uneventful. This morning was both wet and windy, and I practiced all my scales and technique to an accompaniment of wild weather sounds from outside. I was really happy with how quite a bit of it went, particularly on the memory side of things. My Reichert exercises felt easy, even when I pushed the tempo, and compared to where I was a month ago with them I’m really happy with how they’re sounding. Some of the other exercises were also feeling good, and I’ve finally got the first page of Bach’s E minor sonata (half of the first movement) from memory.

There are still things that are frustrating me though, one of them being the Maquarre exercises. Given they’re written specifically to make us play the unexpected, but it feels like I can’t get them into my fingers! I’ve finally got the C major version of exercises one from memory, but can’t then transpose it to any other key with any ease. I think these could be the next candidates for mental practice.

The Moyse 25 Melodic Studies are quite a bit harder than the 24, and all of a sudden I need to spend time learning the notes as well as working on the meaning of the study. No. 5 is particularly frustrating, as it looks like easy arpeggio figures, but some of them don’t sit under the fingers well and then I tie myself in knots. Hopefully most of them will be unraveled in time for class on Monday!

I went for a run just as the sun was setting, and though it was still ridiculously windy made it round my short 2-mile circuit in almost record time. I felt like I could have run further, but forays off into the Kentish Downs probably aren’t a good idea when it’s getting dark.