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.