Tag Archives: Faure Fantasie

Day 121 – January 29th – Nerves

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I didn’t have a great day today. Little by little, I feel like I’ve been becoming more nervous in classes, and this week it’s been particularly bad. It’s frustrating, because I know that I’m improving in the practice room and what I can do there, but can’t seem to reproduce that in front of the class.

Things started out quite well, and for the first time ever my starting tune was passed without criticism. But then Trevor went off on a tangent on intonation for a while, using me as the teaching demonstration. This unnerved me, and I ended up playing both my orchestral extract The Banks of the Green Willow and the Faure some way below par. In the Butterley, the nerves manifested themselves as shaky vibrato and wandering pitch, and in the Faure a lot of missed noted. I feel like I need to find some time to chat with Trevor about the nerves, because I don’t think they’re helping matters at all, and at the moment he’s making me feel like I can’t do anything right no matter how much I practice. However, he keeps cancelling our evening walks, and the opportune moment isn’t presenting itself.

Hopefully after tomorrow’s masterclass I can relax a bit more.

Day 120 – January 28th – Notes

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Not much to report today; I did a lot of practice for tomorrow and Friday, finished my Mozart cadenza and took myself off for a walk in the afternoon. Trevor still isn’t 100% over his cold, and so cancelled our walk this evening. I’m trying desperately to avoid unnecessary cabin fever, and so jumped when the rain cleared in the afternoon. I walked east, up and down the windy hills. It’s a walk I like – not many cars, and some lovely sweeping views over the fields. It was still blustery, and by the time I got back my face and hands were pink and chilled.

While the Faure Fantasie for tomorrow is sounding quite good, I still need to do a bit more work on the notes in the Taffanel Scherzettino for Friday. They’re almost there, and considering how little time I’ve had to learn the piece it’s coming along quite well. I just need to remember that it’s better to practice slowly and get the notes right rather than trying to play too fast!

After the work on my Mozart cadenza yesterday I wrote it up this afternoon. Trevor wants it written out with bars, and asked for ‘no less that eight’. I’ve ended up with thirteen (or sixteen if you count a starting section I’m not totally sure I like), and am hoping that it’s not going to be too long, or indeed too pretentious. At the moment I’m quite pleased with it, I think it’s a lot more mature than cadenzas I’ve written in the past, which have tended to err on the side of being rather safe. However, I’m very much prepared for it not being good enough for Trevor tomorrow. Hopefully my doubts are unfounded!

Day 119 – January 27th – Cadenza

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There’s a lot to prepare for class on Thursday and Friday. Our repertoire on Thursday is the Faure Fantasie, but Trevor has also requested a cadenza for the first movement of Mozart’s G major flute concerto. I haven’t written a cadenza in quite a while, and finally got round to it properly today. Trevor seemed quite open to different cadenza ideas, and said that we don’t ‘have to’ end with a trill or begin in a certain way. So, rather than trying to be academic and plan out a chord progression or anything, I decided it was better to just start improvising and see where I got to. After an hour of playing this and that, I have a new love for diminished chords, and what I think will be the middle and end of my cadenza for Thursday. I also have a lot of bits and pieces that could grow into other bits of other cadenzas further down the track.

One of the things the exercise has confirmed for me is the importance of having not just scales and arpeggios under my fingers but practising the sequences that link them. In my improvisation, I often just followed my fingers and the feel of which chord should come next, something that I certainly couldn’t have done four months ago. However, it also reminded me that the only way to really get better at writing cadenzas is to take the time to improvise more – one more thing to add to the daily practice list!

Day 115 – January 23rd – Learning it quickly

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One of the big things I’m learning as part of this course is how to prepare a lot of music very quickly. Last weekend up in London I was telling a friend about all the studies we have to play each week, and then added that Thursday is repertoire and excerpts. She almost fell off her a chair!

While it’s not normally comfortable preparing this much music each week, I’m definitely getting much better at it. This week, however, is another step up again. Not only is Trevor applying pressure to me in particular with studies, we have the Fauré Fantasie on Thursday and then different repertoire for the masterclass on Friday. I’ve played the Fauré before, and so my main worry this morning was the Taffanel for Friday – the Scherzettino in particular needs to be fast and fluid despite some tricky finger passages.

This afternoon, though, I spent 45min working quite solidly on the Taffanel and already feel a lot better about it. I think that I’ve learned to isolate the passages that really need work, and also the type of work that’s needed, rather than assuming I need to spend hours on every last corner of a piece. In the Scherzettino, I need to spend more time on articulation in the theme, as well as some fingering bits at the end. The Andante Pastoral isn’t as hard as it looks – there are a couple of demi-semiquaver flourishes at the end that need a bit more time, but otherwise it’s basically counting and making sure that my ornaments in the poco piu mosso stay in time.

The other big factor in learning all the music quickly is definitely all the scales and finger exercises – my fingers fall into the patterns so much more easily now! The studies, though, are another story. They’re meant to be hard, to challenge both our technique and our musicality. Looks like they’re what I’ll be working on after piccolo class tomorrow!