No entries for the last while - I guess my excuse was practicing piano and cello fairly intensely. This weekend I went to a chamber music workshop at Cal State Hayward, put on by the Chamber Musicians of Northern California. I had heard about it a few months ago while doing some idle web surfing and on a whim decided to join the organization and sign up for the workshop.

When I got there the biggest surprise for me was the age composition: I was definitely the youngest person there, with the average age of the 100+ people being at least 60. Nonetheless, besides my usual social retardedness, especially among a group of people for whom hearing aids seemed to be the norm, it turned out to be pretty fun. Saturday morning and afternoon was spent playing cello on an early Beethoven string quartet with some other fairly good players under coached supervision for a master class in the afternoon, then listening to a concert in the afternoon where they put on the Schubert C major quintet - an absolutely gorgeous piece (especially the two cello parts) that I was hearing for the first time. After dinner the evening was given up for “freelancing” (finding other random musicians to form random chamber groups) and so I joined two other people to read through some Mozart flute trios.

Today was more challenging piece wise. I had signed up for piano for both days, but was told that too many pianists had signed up, and had to settle for piano only today. They did however assign me a great piece which they told me about in advance (they do this for piano players): the Schumann piano quintet - a very difficult piano part which I had been freaking out over for the last week. Mimi sent me the music, but due to some fuckup with the shipping department at Ward’s it didn’t get here until just over a week ago. However, all the practice was somewhat for nought since the players I ended up playing with were pretty weak. We just ran through the entire quintet once, and then they got bored and decided to read through some random Brahms and Faure quintets, both of which were a shambles.

The other assignment they gave me in advance was a Mozart piano quartet, and that took up the afternoon with an even worse group. Unfortunately I’m used to playing with good players and so it was chafing to be stuck with a cellist and violinist who could barely read their parts - it’s Mozart, for god’s sake!

Getting to and from Hayward was the worst part of the entire affair - found out Saturday night after waiting around for an hour that the buses had stopped running after 8 pm. Otherwise, it was still chamber music, and for someone who hadn’t done any in years it was heaven.