La Follia

Last year Sophie performed the Corelli version of this. Summit Strings has now learned Vivaldi's composition based on the same theme. Some day we hope to do an entire concert devoted to this theme and some of the many compositions that have used it. We have three other versions and ideas for some video footage.

Csardas revisited

My three older kids and three of their friends at today's regional Suzuki Celebration Concert. They had only 10 minutes with their accompanist before the performance. The accompanist, unfamiliar with the piece, set the opening tempo much too fast, and the kids gradually reeled her in. I thought they did very well and handled that little glitch very professionally. This is a very fun piece to play and they enjoy it a lot. They first learned it at the SVI last summer, and we decided to keep it in their repertoire and keep polishing it because it's such fun and such a crowd-pleaser.

Quartet Strides

Go and have a look at this video, and compare it to the one above. Holy Toledo, these kids have come a long way in a year. It's not great coaching or loads of woodshedding ... they've probably only rehearsed together twenty times since February 2008. But they've matured; they listen better, they care more, they pay attention and play with their inner critics engaged. This was their dress rehearsal run-through.

Danny Boy

At the orchestra concert we always like to have a few small ensemble numbers. Noah's quartet played, but we were short on other stuff so I told my family we'd play something. This was the first time we'd performed as a sextet, with Fiona as well. We had one fifteen-minute rehearsal plus a run-through in the hall. It came off pretty well, I think. The tune is "Danny Boy," a.k.a. "Londonderry Air," a.k.a. "London Derrière," a.k.a. "London Butt" (by my kids -- who else?).

Video O4L

My mom got a new camcorder and let us borrow it this week. Fiona and I decided that for this week we would do her reporting for the SelfDesign program by way of video. There are some fairly random snippets here, just showing off a few different activities that illustrate the range of things she puts her energy into over the course of a week. We put in some of her detail-slogging on violin, because I wanted to show how much more mature she's getting in her practicing. She was really enthusiastic about demonstrating Hands-On Equations, so we put a fair bit of that in too.

Our piano beginner performs

I wish I had caught the announcement too. She's the only one of my children who has ever stood up proud and confident at a recital and told everyone her name and what she is going to play. Okay, Erin does announce just fine now, after years of being pressured into it. But she certainly didn't prior to age 10. For Fiona it was like it was second nature. No big deal.

Anyway, she had a lovely time performing. The students drew lots for performance order and she was 29 out of 31, but most selections were short and she was not at all impatient.

This week I noticed what was written inside the cover of the book this little piece is published in. It says "Erin April 2000." It took me back to my first year as a piano parent. Erin had started piano the October before, when she was almost six, the same timing as Fiona. Erin's progress on piano at that age had startled me. She went very quickly through her first primer book ... and then her second, and third, and eventually on into this book, the Royal Conservatory Introductory (pre-Grade-1) album. I was an shocked and delighted observer of all this rich musical learning. It was the first time I'd been in that situation and I was surprised almost every week by how she was gobbling up the learning.

Fiona's piano learning since starting lessons last October is something I've been quite proud of, but it hasn't surprised me the way Erin's did. Maybe over the past nine years I've become jaded and much harder to surprise. Because it's clear from the date inside the front of the book that Fiona has covered the same ground Erin did but at double the pace. Double a pace that stunned me 9 years ago.

I don't think I'm jaded, though, not really. I think I just appreciate children's amazing learning as natural and inevitable. It's different for each of them, of course. Pace, depth of mastery, direction of interests, creativity, intuitiveness, temperament, learning style, all these things vary from child to child. But the process of a child learning is always amazing. And I'm no longer suprised, nor as prone to make comparisons with others. I take it all in happily, enjoying the journey, but not fussing over the speedometer.

Erin's Mozart

La Folia

Here's my middle girl. Everyone loves her, but she's not often the one to grab the headlines. She likes to do a good job but is comfortable in a background role most of the time.

Someday, like her older siblings before her, her attention-seeking performer's persona will probably arrive on the scene. In the meantime, while she quite enjoys performing, she has to consciously put on that attention-seeking persona as a costume. It's a cloak she doesn't feel quite natural in yet and it tends to slip off her shoulders if she's not keeping an eye on it.

But this La Folia is a big step in the right direction. She kept that costume on most of the time and wore it proudly. It is not an easy piece to play, either from a technical standpoint or in the sense of putting it musically and rhythmically together with the piano. It's like 13 separate little pieces, each with it's own ensemble and technique challenges -- and it's long! When she sat after performing she looked very pleased, but said "wow, that seemed to go on forever!"

Fiona's Bourrée

Fiona has been on a bit musical plateau with violin this fall. We were without lessons from mid-August until the second week of October and that got things off to a slow start. When we got back she easily polished up the first Seitz Concerto movement from Book 4 and while she was given permission to get started on the next one several times, she just didn't seem enthused about moving ahead.

I do worry about the musical and intellectual demands of a 5-year-old working at this level, so I would never want to "assign" new repertoire to her. I've always waited until she's really feeling ready for a new challenge before helping her move ahead. And she seemed happy just to percolate away at her current repertoire level. Instead this fall she's been working hard at learning orchestra music and honing her sight-reading skills -- and of course she's been busy diving into piano lessons, reading novels and starting new challenging stuff in math. She finally launched into the next piece a couple of weeks ago and learned most of it, but then sort of set it aside as she prepared for this weekend's recital.

She was going to perform the Bach Bourrée at the end of Book 3. A week ago she told me quite cheerfully that she was a little worried about playing it badly. Since she was playing fine, I told her that and did my best to reassure her, telling her she'd have lots of rehearsal time and would probably feel less worried after she'd had a chance to play with the accompanist. The first rehearsal went pretty well, so I figured she'd feel better. The only difficulty she'd had was with remembering the final repeat before the 'da capo.' The final rehearsal she had some of the same difficulties. The piece has four separate repeats, plus a final 'da capo' of the first two sections, this time without repeats. And it's five minutes long. It's quite normal for the repeats to be a bit of a problem. She seemed little "tryish"¹ but otherwise fine.

Most of the time she's outgoing, a delighted and enthusiastic performer with very high standards for herself but a resilient roll-with-the-punches kind of attitude. Maybe she was overtired from piano recital the night before. Maybe her perfectionism is looming closer to the surface as she gets older and more intellectually sophisticated. Maybe whatever violin aimlessness she's had this fall was at the root of it. But when it came time to stand up and perform, she was sure she was going to forget repeats and somehow that wasn't acceptable. Her chin started quivering about 8 bars in and by the time she began the repeat of the first section she was starting to cry. I scooped her up and out of the performance space. She hugged me and asked "do I have to play?" Well of course not! I hugged her back plenty.

Later she said she was a little disappointed that she had not played. She would have loved to have played something "without nasty repeats." (If only we'd known how she'd been feeling about this -- there were plenty of other things she could have played!) But it was okay. She knew she'd made the right choice at the time. There will be plenty of other recitals, and she's already looking forward to them.

So the video above is of her rehearsal, not her aborted performance. You can see where her "repeat worries" were already looming. But I think you can still get a sense of how she's playing these days. I'm sure that when she's ready her "zoom" will return.

¹ tryish adj. trī-ish
The state of being highly focused on an outcome and susceptible to potential frustration.

Number 5 Dance Guy

Noah chose two contrasting pieces to play on the recital. One was tender and sentimental, the other rollicking and showy. It was only when I saw the written program that I realized both were Number 5 Dances. Meaning he had chosen the fifth of six short pieces in the Beethoven "Country Dances" suite as well as that well-known Hungarian Dance #5 by Brahms.

His Brahms finished the concert for us. There's no way anyone could have played anything after this finish!

Adult choir

Last year I posted a clip from the family choir that Allison directs at VSSM. Erin has usually done the Adult Choir, and this year Noah opted to join her. He had been quite inspired by listening to the local Community Choir's performance last spring and I had suggested that he might like to try the Adult Choir during the VSSM week to see whether four-part choral singing was enjoyable to him. I honestly expected him to change his mind once it got imminent but on the day VSSM began he was happy to register for choir. He ended up with a bit of a cold through the week but was still keen to sing. He was the youngest in the choir by a good bit but had the company of a friend and of his sister so it felt comfortable. And Allison is just amazing at how she works with the group, so encouraging and full of gentle humour, yet with a knack for bringing a group to a high musical level. This is just a short clip of "Minoi, Minoi," an a cappella song in Samoan. Noah is the little guy in the orange shirt. Erin is on the left, occasionally visible behind the swaying woman.



Now Noah would like to join the community choir. The director would like to have him, as she sang in the Adult Choir and was very impressed with his behaviour and ability, but is a little concerned about setting the precedent of accepting children (even Erin was turning 13 the year she joined). She's going to think about it. We'll see.

She also plays piano

Someday, she thinks, she'd like to focus on accompanying. I'm sure she'd be fabulous at it. She's actually been doing some simple accompanying of Book 1 & 2 Suzuki students since about the age of 8 and has always been a proper accompanist -- following and supporting her soloist rather than hammering through her own part. For now piano is sort of a hobby, something that gets squeezed around the corners of the violin & choral stuff she's more passionate about. Too bad she's so good at it ... people expect a certain drive and committment to it, something that's been in short supply lately. But during the VSSM week she did focus mostly on piano, and did some nice playing. Here's her performance of the Khatchaturian Toccata from the Friday piano recital.

Everybody's solos

The truth is, I blog for my own selfish reasons, not to provide ideas, inspiration, counter-examples or entertainment for others. And so I will shamelessly post these videos of my children playing string solos as a sort of virtual scrapbook / home movie that I can look back on in future years. I've now been blogging for over 10 years. I wish I'd had digital video capability back at the beginning. Here's one solo from each of my kids on their stringed instruments.

Fiona is now almost ready to start Suzuki book 4 but at the SVI she performed a piece she learned quite a while ago, "Two Grenadiers" by Schumann from Book 2. It was a chance to enjoy playing different articulations, rhythms and musical feelings, and to exercise her vibrato and intonation skills.



Sophie's performance is from late last winter, the first movement of the Vivaldi a minor. It's a "golden oldie" for her (really the best kind of performance piece for young students, I think), but I especially like this performance because she managed to project confidence and energy when she played, a capacity which has waxed and waned over the past year.


Noah's Allemande is all about heart and musical sensitivity. Technically this piece is not a big challenge, but in terms of musical subtlety and sensitivity it will take as much as a student can give. Noah has so much in the way of natural musicality and I think that really shines in this solo performance of the Allemande from the Bach Solo Suite in G Major.


This is Erin's performance of the Bloch Nigun. She had polished this up last winter but unfortunately was not able to perform it accompanied until late this summer. It was nice to finally get the chance. It's not quite as polished in this performance as it was a few months ago, as she'd been working mostly on a couple of new concertos all summer long, but it was nice to have the piano.

Mendelssohn Quartet

It's just video after video around here lately, I know. There are probably a few more to come, but it won't go on like this for much longer; it's just that it's mostly during three weeks in August that my kids get the opportunity to perform in ensembles and with accompanists.

This week Erin was involved in the Chamber Music class at the Valhalla Intensive Performers' Program. For a couple of hours a day, teens meet in groups to rehearse assigned chamber music works. They are coached by a couple of different teachers each day for short stints and work independently for about half the time. The program has a nice collaborative, supportive atmosphere.

This is Erin's third year in the program. Last year she played piano instead of violin due to instrumentation challenges within the program -- the usual dearth of violists. This year by request she was back on violin. Her quartet (three teen girls plus Erin's teacher / coach playing viola) was given a simple Mozart movement on Monday to work on. The girls, it seems, were less inspired by the prospect of polishing up the Mozart than they were by the challenge offered by the Mendelssohn quartet movement they given were given on Tuesday as 'a reading exercise for fun.' On Wednesday they decided to focus on the Mendelssohn and discard the Mozart entirely. Thursday and Friday were devoted mostly to pre-performance and performance run-throughs, so they didn't actually get a whole lot of rehearsal time. There are some intonation and ensemble issues in evidence in this recording of Friday's performance, but all in all I think they did a great job of pulling together a big work in very little time.

Jovano Jovanke

I'm not quite sure how this took shape. Two of the students (one being my eldest) had performed this at another institute with the ringleader-faculty-member. They decided between them that there should be a Valhalla version as well. So they conned, coerced, encouraged and brokered deals to get a couple of other students and a bunch of faculty members playing too. They performed it as an "entr'acte" between the cello and violin performances at the final concert. Amidst all the chair-shuffling, chaos and noise, they had a lot of fun. My first try at rendering this produced a lot of distortion from the tambourine; I think this version is a bit better.

Shoe-guy piano quintet

Erin received her violin part for her string quartet in Edmonton & Montreal and her piano part for her piano quintet back home here for the VSSM the same week. The former was a Schubert piece, the latter a Schumann work. So we talked about the Shoe-guys she was playing this summer. Because she was on her own in Edmonton and Montreal I don't have a video of the quartet performances. But tonight, after being corralled as a page-turner for my kid, I handed the video camera off to Chuck and he recorded the Schumann.

It was a dynamite chamber group she was in this week. At the first rehearsal on Monday when she saw the 1st violinist's cue for the downbeat she realized "holy ___, this is going to be fast!" and her eyes lit up and her adrenaline started pumping and her fingers started their happy fast dance across the keys. She'd been working on the music as the situation allowed for the month or so prior (a challenge given that she was in the midst of scores of hours of string music programming away from home), but she didn't realize who was going to be in the ensemble. When she arrived and saw that these were the students who had been at the top end of the VSSM a year or two ago, it was clear she'd been placed in a rather different league. She ramped up the tempo and thrilled at the challenge.

I think she did a phenomenal job. I hadn't heard any of the rehearsals, so I was as awed and thrilled as everyone else at the performance. And I was right in the thick of it, turning pages, wondering how this kid of mine could possibly be playing all those notes! I am not a pianist, which increases my awe many-fold.

Csardas

The senior repertory class at SVI is small, as is the whole institute (80 students), so we have a range of ages and levels and the violins and violas are combined. This year they spent half of each hour-long class working on this very fun composition by Michael MacLean, his "Csardas." They had a lot of fun, in large part because it's such a fun piece. Erin is second from the left, Noah is second from the right, and Sophie is the tiny little thing more or less in the middle. Enjoy!

The Flawless Four

I was a little apprehensive about Noah's quartet placement at the SVI. Due to a dearth of violists he was the most experienced chamber music player enrolled this year on viola. When we needed someone to put in a quartet with his vastly capable older sister and another dynamite young violinist, there was really no more logical choice than Noah. I thought, though, that he might be intimidated and lacking in confidence. I turns out I needn't have worried. The quartet, though not ideally matched on paper in terms of levels, experience and maturity, was beautifully cohesive in reality. Noah's musicality, Erin's experience, Nicole's sensitivity and confidence and Nick's all-round balance of good humour and work ethic made for an ensemble that, it was clear from day one, was going to be impressive. Five hours of rehearsing later we ended up with four kids calling themselves "The Flawless Four."

They were set up in a very 'open' configuration for performance due to the constraints of the stage, playing more or less in a row rather than a cluster. The result was that Noah's hard-won habit of communicating visually with his quartet-mates ended up involving a lot of rubber-necking. Watch his head during the last few chords .... oh my, we laughed when we noticed that on the video.

Erin's Kreisler

This is the piece Erin taught herself in the space of a couple of weeks last fall -- the Praeludium and Allegro by Fritz Kreisler. She's kept it in her repertoire and has used it to work on refining some of her advanced bowing techniques. Last week she finally got the chance to play the piece with an accompanist. Uncharacteristically she controlled her tempo in the Allegro and went for clean playing rather than speed (oh, she does like to play fast, this kid!) But this recording is to serve as an audition selection for a chamber music program where she's been told they're looking for clarity of rhythm and intonation, not technical brilliance. I think she did a good job of taking that into account.

When we arrived for the session, Erin and her accompanist didn't even play through the whole piece once to rehearse it -- they just tried it out on camera and it worked fine straight up. It was the easiest recording session I've ever done for a student!

Unaccompanied coffee house Bach

Here's part of Erin's violin contribution to the coffee house. We were all sick and tired, including the family's three performers and our two ever-patient observers. I left Fiona at a table with the other kids and her grandma to squat in the front row and shoot the video. Half-asleep, I think she sort of lost track of where I was. She started crying, with great choking sobs part way through, just before the cut I made to abridge the four minutes to 1 1/2. You can see Erin notice -- her eyes flick off the the left and then back to me, and then she smiles as Fiona's grandma picks her up to comfort her. Fiona recovered, poor mite. And Erin didn't miss a note. The audience chuckle/sigh at the end is from the warm understanding crowd that was following the whole drama -- and appreciated what Erin had managed to pull off in spite of her little sister's meltdown.