Control/Some things get outta control

I finished my third year exams a few weeks ago; I now have a year and a bit of co-op work at an engineering consulting company before returning to school for the final year. My last exam this year was for the first course in control systems, which seems to have a reputation for being a frequently-failed course, but I had been looking forward to since first year after seeing this demonstration by Steve Brunton:

So I figured I would have a of break between finishing school and starting work. Then, right after I got home from the exam in the evening, I got a call from the Kingston Symphony, desperately looking for someone to play principal on Ravel Piano Concerto due to illness, with the concert the day after next. I said that I would kind of rather not but if they couldn’t find anyone else, if they paid for a rental car I could make it there in time for the dress rehearsal.

The next morning, having squeezed in a half hour of practice for a resounding “good enough,” I showed up at the car rental place and asked for the smallest car they had left, please, which netted me this:

Which looks like the kind of vehicle that is incomplete without a “MY OTHER RIDE IS A CYBERTRUCK” bumper sticker. But it did get me to Kingston, where I played their dress and concert seemingly Good Enough for everyone else too (as far as I can recall the last time I performed the piece– luckily also with the full 3rd mvt solo, as requested here– was on the day of my tenure meeting in Regina, which was also immediately before flying out to play Five Sacred Trees in Niagara, so it’s difficult to imagine a less-pressure situation than saving the day just by being a warm body in a chair.)

Everyone in Kingston was incredibly kind, the orchestra sounded great, and the hall is beautiful– this was the view from the lobby and outside the hall:

So I got a, erm, bonus vacation before starting work. Now I’ve been at CEM Engineering in St. Catharines for two weeks, getting familiar with types of engineering drawings that they do NOT show you in school, listening to podcasts on my commute– which makes me feel a bit like one of those “dogs doing human things” memes, you know

(Photo: Instagram @hugoandursula)

“Ooh, look at me, I’m a human, I drink coffee and listen to Canadaland on my way to the office,” etc.

Important Parisian animals

Duck couple

A nice resting spot

The rabbit tasked with guarding the tomb of Napoleon

Notre-Dame, Natural History, Paris Mosque

Went to Notre-Dame right after it opened this morning, so caught some of a mass in progress: Wow, it’s just like in Conclave!

The Natural History museum is a bit of an odd place: one doesn’t, in daily life, get used to seeing quite that much aging taxidermy in one place. They also made a fake thunderstorm with the ceiling, for some reason. Same, shark.

Right across the street, the Paris Grand Mosque, modelled on al-Qarawiyyin in Fez:

At the Arènes de Lutèce, a Roman amphitheatre:

Père-Lachaise and Médée

First, pregamed Cherubini at le cimetière du Père-Lachaise:

Other highlight, my good buddy Joseph Fourier:

Apparently Pierre-Simon de Laplace was initially buried there, but was removed to Normandy, so I couldn’t get the full set {s ∈ C}.

Cherubini’s Médée in the afternoon, at the Opéra-Comique. The building is Opéra-Comique.v3, as v1 and v2 both burned down.

I saw Médée at the COC relatively recently, a production whose insanely opulent stage design had the effect of overpowering the relatively lightweight music so comprehensively that it made the attempt at horror seem laughable. This was the opposite; it had a small period orchestra, simple set and modern but not overly self-conscious costumes, and added to the spoken libretto with small extra speeches and bits of pantomime that had the effect of actually making the music seem serious and suitable for the topic.

Last Week Tonight with Alexander the Great

Last weekend I played La Mer and Fountains of Rome with the Ontario Philharmonic, which is in Oshawa; I’ve driven to that orchestra before, but I ended up carless for some services this time, so took the train as far as it goes, Hamilton to Oshawa:

A small miracle: on my way home from that concert, the Oshawa to Hamilton train by necessaity passing through a minor town in between where there was a concert apparently attended by a couple people at least… my train pulled out of Union station ten minutes before the reported end of the Taylor Swift set.

At a choral concert last month, I read in the program that one of the involved choirs’ next concert was Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with the Hamilton Philharmonic, one of my favourite pieces, which I got to play some of last year, but hadn’t expected to ever play for real. “I can’t believe they’re doing Alexander’s Feast in Hamilton and I’m not playing it,” I thought, distraught, and manifested an email hiring me for it the next day.

That concert was paired this week with a chamber music concert of Mozart’s Gran Partita, which fatigue-wise is not really what you want to have a dress rehearsal for right before a concert of Baroque continuo.

Two weekends of Baroque gigs

The setup for last night’s concert: you know the party’s really getting started when they bring out the third harpsichord. I got a break for the triple harpsichord concerto, however, which was appreciated since the remainder of the concert was the Handel coronation anthems and the 3rd Bach orchestral suite, which is enough continuo to satisfy any level of masochist. The legendary soft reed that I played for almost all my Baroque concerts last season finally requested a peaceful retirement, so I had to finish some new ones…

Which I won’t need next week, because next week’s Baroque show is BWV 149, a bassoon part that calls to mind Bach sitting at his desk thinking “gee, I sure hope someone completely reinvents this instrument in a hundred years or so.”

The Conductor Hole

The Burlington Performing Arts Centre is very committed to ensuring things to not fall in the orchestra pit. Which is appreciated, however, has the amusing effect that the conductor needs to stand on the podium located under the net while sticking their head out of this… conductor hole.

Playing La Bohème this week, calling to mind the words of my conducting teacher, Alain Cazes, at music school: “If you ever have the chance to listen to a Puccini opera with the score, you will freak out! I guarantee it! You will freak out!”

Indiana

With the fish that haven’t been stolen They told me to kiss the bricks but they weren’t kissing back Mr. Maxym’s bassoon in the process of being restored, Canadian dime possibly by Stéphane?

The real purpose of a trip to Indiana: a bassoon overhaul by Paul Nordby. My bassoon hasn’t been touched by anyone but me since before I got the Regina job, so I’d developed something of a “if something goes wrong it’s because you suck, learn to make a reed, idiot” approach to diagnosing issues. (A philosophy not scorned in the Nordby studio, it seems: several buttons strung up proclaimed the motto “Schmuck, go home and practice!”) However, now that the pads on the instrument actually seal and the corks/felt aren’t thirty seconds from falling right off, playing the right notes at the right time at the right pitch has never felt so possible!

heeeey

Metronome

Pst of basic (but somehow also, seemingly, top-secret) info from Bret Pimentel, Use your metronome most of the time, with some excellent quotes:

I know very few musicians who have the problem that their tempos are too steady. It’s important to practice the tempo nuances too, but if you can’t play the line in perfect time then you probably can’t do a convincing accelerando/ritardando.

In my experience, there are two kinds of musicians who think they don’t need a metronome. One is the top 1%, who have spent a lifetime developing world-class musical abilities. The other is beginning and intermediate musicians, who haven’t learned the value of metronome work because they haven’t done it enough. Don’t mistake a top-level musician’s musings for good beginner advice.