Oops… I haven’t written here in a while. In that time, things have happened! First, the last week of the summer I went to camp! The Interprovincial Music Camp is a terrific camp outside of Parry Sound which I attended as a student in high school. Fraser Jackson, the contrabassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, was on faculty there, and after my first year at the camp I became his student and stayed in his studio until I left for university. Then, last year, Fraser emailed me and asked if I would like to come back to camp as his Faculty Assistant. Every faculty member is allowed to choose an assistant, usually a university-aged student of theirs or a young professional player, to teach with them at camp. So this was my second year doing that and it was awesome! As well as being a great experience teaching, it’s also lots of fun because all of the faculty assistants, many of us who know each other from school or summer festivals, live together in two big cabins near the entrance to the camp, with our own fire pit and easy access to the lake. Unlike the camp councillors, who are usually similar in age, the faculty assistants have no responsibilities to deal with the campers other than in strictly musical contexts, whereas the councillors have to take care of a cabin full of kids and– having been a camper, I can imagine how difficult and frustrating this must be– keep them quiet at night. Because there aren’t usually too many bassoon students, I also get lots of time to practice at camp, which is awesome since the camp takes place the week before the return to school and thus the auditions for the university ensembles. One of my favourite things to do at camp is practice outside, which you sure can’t do in Montreal for most of the year! I was happy with how the audition at school went, and although this concert I’m only playing one piece (principal on the Ginastera Harp concerto) next concert I get to play principal on Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2– and at Maison Symphonnique, instead of McGill’s Pollack Hall where the McGill Symphony Orchestra usually plays! Then, two days ago, I did another audition, for the Niagara Symphony Orchestra in St. Catherine’s, for whom I’m happy to say I am now principal bassoon! The audition day was a doubleheader in which they hired for both principal oboe and bassoon, and I’m really excited to play my first concert with them in almost exactly a month (they had already hired a bassoon and oboe for the first concert, so myself and the winner of the oboe audition are playing our first show on the second concert of the season.) However, I don’t have a contract or a detailed rehearsal schedule yet, so it remains to be seen how much I’m going to have to wiggle out of McGill obligations for Niagara stuff! Now I can finally take a break from practicing excerpts (except for Rite of Spring– since the MGSO is playing it on the last concert of the first semester, the McGill bassoon studio is holding a separate audition for the principal part that will take place some time later in the semester) and focus on Bach’s 2nd cello suite, which I will play in a masterclass for Nadina Mackie Jackson next week. She is coming to perform the bassoon sequenza in an enormous Berio extravaganza concert next Friday. I actually love Berio, so I’m really excited to hear it! (Check out my colleague from this summer, Sam Fraser, performing a hilarious comedy act entitled “The Lost Berio Sequenza” at the NYO talent show this summer: http://youtu.be/DMUoqpLzqJU )
One of the things that I didn’t mention in my last post was my audition for the Winnipeg Symphony, which I played during the first day off from NYO (and made it back in time for madrigals the next morning!) Obviously, I didn’t win the job, or I probably would have mentioned it. However, I am enormously glad that I did the audition. The main reason is that my low playing and tuning in that register improved enormously from the preparation I did for the audition. For some reason, when I got back from India and started preparing for Winnipeg, I suddenly got fed up with always having to worry about whether I was gonna be able to play a low D, for example, low enough, and decided to just learn how to do it already. Easier said than done, of course, but at some point you do have to say it! The first thing I did was play a huge number of long tones in that area, and experiment until I figured out what to do with my mouth in order to manipulate the pitch while keeping the note stable. (I lowered my teeth. Which isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation, I know, but sometimes you just need to think about it and practice it the right way for it to actually click…) I also had a few lessons with Sam Banks, the second bassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, who encouraged me to start making reeds specifically for low, soft playing and let me play some of his in order to understand what that could actually feel like. By the time I got to the audition, I could play the excerpt from Brahms violin concerto, for example, without being worried that the notes wouldn’t speak, which was–embarrassingly– a huge revelation! It also came in handy when I got back to NYO, where I was playing 2nd on the Sibelius violin concerto. Anyway, besides improving at that specific aspect of my playing, it was also a huge challenge to prepare for the audition in less time than I had to prepare for KW (a month as opposed to three months) and continue my preparation the week before the audition while taking part in NYO. Although it was difficult to find time to practice during the week I was doing both, it was also enormously helpful to be surrounded by so many faculty members willing to volunteer their time above and beyond the regular coachings. Gabe Radford, the 3rd horn of the Toronto Symphony, was particularly helpful– he always leads a discussion/lecture with the faculty on auditioning, which all of the wind and brass students attend and can ask questions at, and after that I asked him to listen to some of my excerpt in a mock audition style. I ended up playing three “rounds” for him, each one beginning with me waiting a few minutes outside the door to his office, as in a real audition, and practicing thinking the kinds of thoughts I would want to be thinking before walking into the audition room. He was even able to tell me some things about how the setup of the audition would be, having played in that orchestra himself. The audition itself went really well for me. Almost everyone there knew each other from various places (and most were from Ontario) so it was a very friendly atmosphere. I was very calm and played everything exactly as I had practiced it, which is really all you can ever ask for! I have to admit, although before I played I didn’t let my thoughts get away from me and concentrated only on playing well, in the time between when I finished playing and when they announced the second round I allowed myself to get my hopes up and thus was slightly disappointed when they only took one person (not me) into the second round. Luckily all the rest of us were friends, went out for lunch and had a pleasant day in Winnipeg anyway. (We later found out that they had stopped after the second round and didn’t end up hiring.) As per the advice from Gabe’s audition seminar, I emailed the personnel manager asking for comments on my audition and got some very helpful comments from the principal bassoon, as well as finding out that I had been short just one vote to advance. All in all it was an excellent experience. I don’t think I would want to do an audition in the middle of a summer program like that again, but I’m certainly glad I did this time. My next audition (after the ensemble placement audition at school) will be for the Niagara Symphony in mid-September!
Last Sunday, NYOC 2013 played our final concert in the University of British Columbia’s Chan Center in Vancouver. That was the last stop of the tour that started at Koerner Hall in Toronto; we then went to Ottawa to play in the National Arts Centre, Montreal to record Mahler 9 in the MMR and play at the outdoor Theatre de Verdure (the only venue I’ve ever played where there was a real live moat around the stage…), Calgary in the Jack Singer, Edmonton at the Winspear, and ended in Vancouver. There were chamber concerts throughout, which is new for the NYO; usually the chamber music is finished after the first two weeks of the training session, whereas this year every wind group and a few string groups were asked to play additional concerts in churches or hospitals. Luckily my group played in Cambridge, not far from Kitchener-Waterloo, not too long after the chamber session had ended so we didn’t have to worry about finding space in our brains for chamber music once the tour started.
The tour started pretty quietly, travel-wise, in Toronto, with a whole free day. We took advantage of some rooms at GGS and U of T to make reeds. Ottawa was next with its endless tourist attractions; I ended up going back to my very favoritest bar ever, the Zaphod Beeblebrox club in Byward Market– where you can get a real live Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster!– to hear a folk band that half the NYOC oboe section went to high school with. Small world… On to Montreal, where Kevin and Bianca discovered the joys of the Oversize Score collection in the library.We then took a plane to Alberta, where we saw some wildlife, some mountains, and took an early morning hike up one of them before finally arriving in Vancouver! Michelle, one of the oboists in the section, invited the whole double-reed section over to her house for dinner in Vancouver. Her mother, as well as being a lecturer in engineering at UBC, also runs Twinklebelle, and had tons of amazing accessories lying around the house waiting for trade shows or to be shipped out. We tested some designs of ornamental flower accessories for her, which she ended up allowing us to wear for the next day’s concert! (Only the black ones, of course…) Now I’m back in Toronto and have two weeks before I hopefully ship out to the Interprovincial Music Camp to work as a Facuty Assistant for a week, and then head straight back to McGill for a new school year!
For the past three days I’ve been at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener-Waterloo, working with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. This is my third year in the orchestra and the first time that the session has been held at Laurier– the previous two years have been at Western University in London, Ontario. The first two weeks of the orchestra are in fact a chamber program, so I’ve been working with a wind quintet. Generally the wind quintets are assigned a simpler, often Classical piece for the first week of the chamber session and a more substantial work for the second week. The second-week pieces are going with somewhat more obscure Canadian music this year, with my group doing a quintet by Kelsey Jones (which in my opinion sounds like a cross between Hetu and Shostakovich) and another group playing Erik Ewazen’s Roaring Fork. However, for the first week were assigned a Haydn divertimento (from which Brahms’ Haydn Variations take their theme) which was quite short, and we ended up visiting the Laurier music library to borrow some other quintets to read. We got a Danzi quintet, the Nielsen, and the wind quintet arrangement of Tombeau de Couperin– and somehow ended up deciding to entirely replace the Haydn with the Ravel for the concert on Friday! Needless to say, there has been and will continue to be quite a bit of woodshedding going on before the concert. At the same time, I’m in the final stages of preparation for the Winnipeg audition. I fly out to Winnipeg after my last rehearsal this Saturday, play the audition Sunday morning (Sunday is a day off at NYO except for a concert in the evening which I have arranged not to play in) and fly back Sunday night. For Saturday night I’m staying it a place from airbnb.com where the host turns out to be a musician who’s been playing with the symphony! Overall I feel pretty good about the excerpts. It’s somewhat difficult that I’m at NYO right now since the amount of playing I’m having to do in a day– with all of the rehearsals, practicing for the Winnipeg audition, learning the part for the Ravel for Friday, and preparing for the placement audition for the orchestral session– is rather more than I would prefer for injury-prevention purposes. Fortunately I only have three more days that I have to worry about the Winnipeg excerpts! In the meantime, in all my obviously plentiful spare time, I started working on a piece of can to be hand shaped and profiled. Also in the bassoon section are two students who both hand shape and profile their cane. Although I certainly wouldn’t switch too that method for all of my reeds (difficult to, as the saying goes, “fill a bucket full of reeds” when each one has to be processed by hand), I’m interested in the hand profiling especially as it seems like it might be very instructive regarding the properties of bassoon cane, and even illustrative on aspects of trimming. After all, the distinction between profiling and scraping a reed is less substantial than it seems. The profiler that we use at school scrapes so thin that it essentially begins the finishing of the reed for you, but I don’t want to be dependant upon one specific profiler to be able to make good reeds. Anyway, so far all I have is a piece of cane left rather lopsided by my clumsy freehand shaping, so we shall see how it progresses.
Yesterday I went to Kitchener to hear the Kitchener-Waterloo symphony play Symphonie Fantastique. The orchestra sounded great and Center in the Square is a really fun hall to go to– it has beautiful acoustics, seems to always be well-attended and also somehow cultivates the kind of community vibe that you feel walking into a summer show at Tanglewood or similar. Since NYO is training at Laurier this summer, it was nice to see the city of Kitchener-Waterloo as well. Dinner before the show came from Imbibe,the bar/restaurant beside the Conrad Center, and this morning was Matter of Taste, followed by brunch at Rise and Shine, a diner on the Waterloo side of the city divide. I briefly got to see the Laurier music building, from the outside, and am excited to hang out there this summer! I have actually been there before; in my last year of high school I visited the school and did a mock audition, which was an incredibly nice thing for the music school to do– give potential students the opportunity to see the school and practice auditioning there. I was even met and shown around by two bassoon students there. This was, in fact, the only school visit I did, and only because it was close. I was a somewhat negligent Gr. 12 student, in comparison with some of my friends who were doing university tours all over the country in the 11th and even 10th grades, and I actually never set foot in the McGill music building before my audition. In fact I didn’t end up going to the real Laurier audition, but it was fun to look around. It was good to hear the Berlioz live this weekend since I’ve even practicing the excerpts from it. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid having to learn Symphonie Fantastique properly until now, but I’m preparing for the Winnipeg Symphony second bassoon audition and the excerpts have finally caught up to me. The audition itself I’m not 100% sure about yet– it’s on June 30, which is a week after NYO starts but on a day which when I checked last was tentatively scheduled as a day off. It also means that I have exactly a month to prepare for this one, whereas for KW I had three months and definitely needed all of them. However, this time I have done one audition that I had a good experience at, and although there are more pieces listed for Winnipeg than KW there are bar numbers instead of whole movements given, which is nice. The other pieces on the program at KW last night were a Beethoven piano concerto– played by the boyfriend of a violist on the India trip, whaddaya know?– and an orchestral arrangement of Vivier’s Pulau Duwata_._
For the past two years I have been playing in the summer with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, a summer program running about a month and a half in length and including a chamber session, orchestral training session, and tour (usually to mostly cities in Canada and one or two in the US.) I will be playing in the orchestra again this summer, but before the session itself starts in June there is another fantastic thing that I get to do as a result of this program– the CIYO, Canada-India Youth Orchestra. This is a collaboration between the NYOC and the Indian National Youth Orchestra, and involves two phases. Last summer, four string players from the INYO came to London, Ontario to train and tour with us in the NYOC. This summer, about 30 Canadians pulled from the past 3 or so years of NYOC rosters, including myself, will be traveling to India to join with the INYO for two weeks of rehearsal and concerts. Tonight the orchestra members, staff, and donors attended a reception hosted at the Toronto Dominion Centre, and tomorrow we leave from Toronto and travel for nearly a full day, including a layover at Heathrow, landing in Bangalore to begin probably the most exciting orchestral adventure that any of us have ever been a part of! Happy summer!
My jury is played, final assignment turned in, and I’m back at my parents’ house in Toronto learning to drive and practicing the rep that I’ll be playing for the rest of the summer. So, here’s a partial (I’ve probably forgotten things…) list of repertoire I played this school year. In no particular order, and with a varied assortment of ensembles:
Berlioz: Corsair Overture (1st)
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto #1 (2nd)
Scheherazade (1st) -Beethoven 3 (2nd)
Stravinsky: Symphonies D’Instruments a Vents (2nd)
Stravinsky: Mass (1st)
Nielsen: Wind Quintet
Debussy: Nocturnes (2nd)
Petrushka (1st)
Tchaik 5, only the 3rd and 4th movements (1st)
Gounod: Petite Symphonie (1st)
D’Indy: Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1st)
The Miraculous Mandarin Suite (2nd)
Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto (1st)
Claude Vivier: Orion (3rd)
Mozart Requiem (1st)
Parsifal: An Orchestral Quest (2nd) (a Canadian work, an hour-long orchestral arrangement of music from Parsifal which was utterly wonderful)
Paquito D’Riviera: Aires Tropicales for woodwind quintet
My big project for the first semester was the KW audition and for the second was my jury, for which I played the Osborne rhapsody, Saent-Saens Sonata, a Vivaldi concerto, and the Tansman Sonatine.
About a month ago, I did my first professional audition, for the 2nd bassoon of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. All in all, it was not so different from an audition here at school. For the ensemble auditions in the bassoon studio at McGill, there are two rounds. In general, those who make it to the second round will be in the McGill Symphony Orchestra, and those who get cut after the first will be in the Wind Symphony or Contemporary Music Ensemble. For my first two auditions, I didn’t make it past the first round. So, when I made it into the second round for the first time, I was so pleased that I allowed my concentration to slip while playing the second round (which, I rationalized, didn’t matter since I had already made it into orchestra.) The next time, however, I was prepared to concentrate through both rounds and aim to win the audition or improve my standing instead of just being content with being in orchestra. In the KW audition, I made it into the second round and then got cut before the finals. I found much the same thing happened– since I didn’t want/feel prepared to take the job anyway, and since I hadn’t even really expected to make it into the semis, I wasn’t particularly concentrated while playing them and made some stupid mistakes. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether avoiding making those mistakes would have gotten me into the finals, but at least it would have been more because of the panel’s preferences and less a matter of having to cut me by default because I made an unacceptable number of mistakes. However, all in all it was a very positive experience, and left me wanting to do it again, with higher aspirations. The one thing I will do next time that I should have this time was to check my hotel room for anything that might keep me awake and get a room change as soon as possible if there are any problems. When I arrived it was extremely cold outside, and I was so glad to be a room with a heater that I didn’t think about the fact that the heater was extremely noisy and came on and off according to the temperature in the room with a clunk which, as I discovered when I went to bed, was loud enough to wake me up every time. At midnight I finally called the front desk and asked to be moved to a room with a different type of heater. I was settled in the new room at 12:30, asleep by 1… and slept through my alarm, waking up half an hour before my time slot in the audition began. Whoops! Luckily I played third in the time slot, so I actually had exactly the right amount of time to warm up and not enough to hang around getting nervous. I’ll hopefully be doing a similar audition next year…