Back to bassoon: orchestral practicing

(I wrote this entire post on Wednesday, and then lost it. Aaargh!)

At the ripe old age of 42, I have joined the local youth orchestra. 

I'm exaggerating slightly for effect, obviously. I spent many years in Gloucestershire Youth Orchestra when I was an appropriate age, along with the feeder orchestras GYS and MGSO. We were blessed with a pretty awesome setup back in the 90s. 

However we all know the state of youth music these days, and so while the Berkshire Maestros orchestras are apparently thriving and full of bassoons (I'll find out soon, as Small will be starting lessons after Easter!), Reading Youth Orchestra operates under a separate banner and currently doesn't have any appropriately-aged bassoonists. Sucks for the future of British music, but awesome for me as it's given me a semi-regular opportunity to play orchestrally and get my chops back.

With a concert in 4 weeks, I've knuckled down to some serious practice. This is the one big difference I'm finding between first and second instrument: on viola, I can nail the majority of orchestral work with minimal practice, but bassoon is taking some serious discipline to get notes under my fingers reliably. 

We've got a great programme: Coriolan Overture (yay!), a Bond medley arranged by the incoming MD, Fauré's Requiem and Schubert 3. All fun, but all with tricky corners to master.

I started with 5 minutes of Christopher Weait's excellent Warm Ups: a standard part of my practice these days. Then battled the quavers in Coriolan, which look innocuous but go quickly and don't fall under my fingers easily. Still a lot of work to get these up to speed. 

Fauré is more about tone and confidence: it has a numbers of beautiful solo lines, but they're relatively high and I need to make sure that I can start them reliably. Im the process of practice I remembered a slightly different fingering that I used to do, which is working pretty nicely. Slowly, the muscle memory is kicking in! It's also been a good test of tenor clef, which I'm no longer fluent in. It's coming back, but I tend to get angry with anything below middle C. I mean, what's the point?

Finally, making sure that the trio in the Schubert works smoothly. It's a beautiful duet with the oboe, and the RYO oboeist plays absolutely beautifully. I need to try and raise my game to match!

Plenty of work left to do, but possibly on a day when Tiny doesn't want to do her bassoon practice at the same time...