levork.org

A New Brain is killing me.

We had a practice on Monday: where the replacement reed player sight read the music (poorly); the synth player quit, and the drum player never showed up.

We had our first run through with the cast on Tuesday: the reed player completely vanished, a new drum player showed up (and thank god, he could sight read); Brian the musical director played the synthesizer with one hand and conducted with the other.

On Wednesday, after fucking up all my cues on Tuesday and realised just how exposed my cello solos are, I burrowed Brian’s CD, made a copy, and spent all of the night practicing like mad.

Tonight was the dress rehearsal, and it actually went well from my point of view – caught all the entries correctly, and I made sense of the solos after much deliberation over fingering:

But it looks like for the entire run, it’ll just be me, the pianist, the drummer, and Brian playing half the synth part. No winds (there’s supposed to be clarinet, oboe, piccolo, and possibly a sax, all of which ostensibly are covered by a single reed player), no bass, and no french horn. Which is a pity, because the cast members are really quite good and they deserve better. I must say though that they don’t seem to project that well over the din of the piano, but noone has made much comment about that so we’ll see if the audience can hear them.

Lugging the damn cello to Berkeley and back all of these nights is damn near killing my shoulder.

Tomorrow is the opening night, with two more performances on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll see how it goes.

Even more cello playing today. Went to another chamber music workshop put on by the CMNC – second one I’ve been to since the previous one, back in October. Today’s cello music was much more satisfying than the Mozart played last time though. When the director called a few weeks ago I was quite put out by being told that I had to play cello and half jokingly told the lady that I didn’t want to be stuck playing some boring bass line in Mozart. So she (sarcastically, I thought) asked if I wanted some difficult Schubert instead and I said sure – and that was what I got today, the Schubert C major quintet, which I had heard for the first time at the last workshop. It’s an absolutely sublime piece of music especially for the two cello parts – big bravura schmaltzy cello duet solo in the first movement, fantastic second movement for second cello part – and the other players in the group were very strong players, so it was great fun all around.

Thursday was the first practice for the musical at Choral Rehearsal Hall in Berkeley – the shipment of the music had been delayed til then. What a shambles it was too. Over the course of the evening it was revealed that the reed player couldn’t commit to all the performances and was looking for her own replacement; there was no chance of finding a french horn player; there was no violin part in the score (unlike what was scored for the CD) so the violinist who showed up had to be turned away; the drummer was AWOL; and the bass player who showed up didn’t have a bass and seemed to be a complete and utter stoner: “So where’s your instrument?” “Uhhh.. whoah dude. I guess that’s gonna be a problem.” So it was just me, the pianist, and the temporary reed player.

Today, the reed player had found her replacement but left the music in a locked office, forcing the replacement to sit around for an hour in frustration while keys were found for the office (in vain); the only bass player we could find played electric bass; the synthesizer was locked in another office; and the drummer showed up an hour late and said he couldn’t practice that night. So, it ended up being just me and the pianist today until we gave up after an hour and a half.

Oh, and the music isn’t very easy either. Lots of fiendish rhythms, and several exposed cello solos up in nasty thumb position.

Things don’t look too good.

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.

Today and every day for the next month, I’ll be practicing cello and piano. Why the sudden piety? Because I signed up a couple weeks ago for a weekend music workshop next month organised by the Chamber Musicians of Northern California, and was told last week that they were happy to accept my application, but unfortunately there were too many pianists and so I couldn’t play piano on both days, but would I like to bring my cello and play that instead on Saturday and then piano on Sunday?

So now I’m forced to bring my horribly rusty cello skills up to date – not to mention that I’ve been telling David that I’ll be sitting in front of the piano wondering just what the hell those black keys are for. This sucks: even though I put down being able to play both instruments, I was gambling on only having to play one of them at the workshop (and thus only have to practice one of them until then).

Mom is going to Vegas tomorrow. Wish I could do the same. But not in her company though – she’s going on some package tour with 11 other elderly Chinese ladies, and you can’t imagine the hell it is vacationing in such an entourage. (Yup: I was dumb enough to do it last year going to Oregon.)

It’s late, I’m finally alone, I’m sipping Coke and JD, and B.B. King (Mimi’s parting gift) is playing in the background. Suitable conditions to revisit the diary.

My sister Mimi is at the moment on the plane back to Vancouver, having been here since the 5th. I think she had a good time, although she had to manage mainly by herself – was only able to spend the first weekend with her, though I did take the Friday off. Did the Chinatown/North Beach/Coit Tower/Pier 39/Embarcadero tour on the 7th (and finally realized just what Pier 39 was), hung about Berkeley and vicinity on the 8th, then on the 9th took a Gray Line tour down the Coastal Highway through Monterey, Carmel, and Pebble Beach. The bus tour was okay. Would have liked to spend more than the 2 allotted hours in the Monterey Aquarium – Monterey itself is a gaudy tourist trap cashing in on its fame as the setting of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Carmel was fairly boring – beautiful town to live in, but the main attraction for the tour was the small artsy stores catering to tourists again. And since I hate golf, the 17 Mile Drive through and around Pebble Beach was cool only for looking at the sea lions on Seal Rock, and gaping at the multimillionaire houses and properties in the vicinity.

Wasn’t able to hang out with Mimi on the second weekend due to Jeff and Greg dropping by for the Metallica concert at Candlestick Park on Friday the 14th. Supposedly it opened at 4 pm, we got there after 5:30 in the hopes of missing Korn (who we guessed would be the first act) but were in time to just catch the opening act – Kid Rock. As expected, he proved himself to be a completely talentless hack who relying on gimmicks – giant inflatable hand raised in middle finger salute, singing midget, and four exotic dancers pole dancing. Greg said he embodies the phrase “Decline of Western Civilization” and I wholeheartedly agree, yet still enjoyed it for the amusement value, especially when he went into the last song – “American Badass”. Either that or I was still enjoying the sunshine, beer, and hot dogs.

The sun went down over the next hour and it became unbearably cold for our t-shirt clad selves – Candlestick, er, 3COM park is a windy stadium. KoRN then took the stage. Jonathan Davis was unintelligible and inaudible, the music all sounded the same, the act just sucked big time – only cool part was when he hauled out the bagpipes. Audience seemed to love them though, so I must be missing something.

Finally at 9 pm, METALLICA took the stage and exploded with Creeping Death, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Seek & Destroy, and Fade To Black. Nearly all the songs were prior to the Black album – only two or three later songs in the whole act – and so we were treated to bloody brilliant renditions of Battery, One, Master of Puppets, The Shortest Straw, Sanitarium, Whiplash, Fuel (okay, this is late, I still like it), Sad But True, and others. Things finally wrapped up at 11:30 with Enter Sandman. As Ryan so eloquently puts it:

They put on the best live shows in the biz ! No one can TOUCH the masters of metal.

I have to agree.

This is where the weekend went to hell.. we waited for the bus for a while and got back to downtown SF at around 12:30. After getting a burger it was 1 am. This is when we discovered that the BART shuts down at 12:20 or so – a completely fucking ridiculous time to have the last train in a teeming metropolis on a Friday night. Got home by taxi.

The next day (Saturday) Greg decided to leave for home instead of Sunday as planned – he took his motorbike down, he had left early Wednesday and gotten in only a few hours before the concert, and decided to take it easy on the way home – so I was left with Jeff to find something to do. And I swear there was something almost sinister in how all the small things just went wrong – not being able to find a decent pool hall in all of downtown SF (except Chalkers, which looked too posh), going to the Metreon looking for a pool hall in the vicinity and not finding one then walking away for an hour only to find out that there was a damn pool hall AT the Metreon, going to two separate movie theatres at two separate times and finding them both sold out (for XMen), going to a pool hall/arcade and sucking at pool and then finding out than every single video game machine had a broken joystick in some way or another – we basically turned into a boring and disappointing weekend after the excitement of the concert.

The only two good points: I finally ate at Tommy’s Joynt (bar/hofbrau in SF, should be familiar to Metallica fans), and I did manage to catch XMen late Saturday – found it quite entertaining and I caught every little reference threw in for those geek comic fans.

This brings us to this work week, which has been less than stellar so far – release madness early on (along with delays caused by yours truly scrambling to check in untested stuff) but we did finally get the release out the door – huzzah! Now we just have the spectre of SIGGRAPH upon us next week, which will ultimately be a week of booth duty and demos for me – joy. And I’ve just realized that like the bonehead I am my plane for New Orleans leaves 6 am on Saturday morning, and recent experience with Mimi has shown that there is no BART service earlier than 8 am on weekends. Looks like another taxi ride – these are starting to get rather costly.

The King is wrapping up. Off to bed.

Addendum: My computer is making this horrid quite screeching/grinding/squeaking noise intermittent and it’s driving me nuts. So if I don’t write here for a while after next week it’s because I’ve thrown it or myself out the window.

Two hours later: putting the computer on its side has stopped the screeching. Interesting..