January 27, 2005 at 7:47 PM

Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. Instead, I have fallen victim to a spurt of post-holiday musician depression, when teachers and orchestras are sluggish in re-starting second-semester lessons and rehearsals.

Consequently, the past month or two has been fearfully unproductive, violinistically speaking. The only highlight was participating in a studio recital at the local university, playing Kol Nidrei. Never mind the fact that there were only twenty people in the audience: it was a fantastic opportunity to strut my stuff in a full-sized concert hall. There were the token bow trembles along with a couple of exciting moments where my pianist and I totally lost contact with each another, but on the whole, intonation was steady and the performance surprisingly good. I was even complimented by a couple of people (which statistically averaged out to be about half the audience), so I was happy.

While I was basking in the glory of my success, I had the idea of attempting to play a solo recital in spring. I needed something big and important to do for my independent study project at school, and I figured, what’s more impressive than a full-length solo recital? As of now, the program consists of Bach and Kreisler…some nice contrast without totally going over the deep end. I’m very excited about it. A wonderful chance for me to invite all my friends and acquaintances and perform without (that much) pressure or anxiety.

While I was practicing after Christmas, my Ging suddenly went out of tune one day - the whole groaning downward chromatic pitch thing. So I was cheerfully twisting the peg around when my fiddle rewarded me with a sudden boiiiing and a slap in the face. No more Ging. I stamped around a bit in frustration and then tried practicing on three strings, but sadly it didn’t work. There wasn’t the same connection; my gentlemanly genial violin was throwing a fit and refusing to cooperate with me. “You’ve let me go with awful strings for a couple of months now; one’s broke and dangling off my side; you don’t have any spares; why should I have to work with you? You’re so awful to me; you never pay any attention to me; I haven’t been polished in weeks; you used to be so careful with me; you don’t love me anymore…” Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. It must sound silly to someone who doesn’t play a stringed instrument, but I swear, they do talk to you…and boy, was mine ever talking to me. As a revenge I emailed a couple of violin shops in Mineapolis and made appointments to try out some new instruments. Despite that, though, we’ve sort of made up…but he’s still holding a grudge, I can tell. Maybe some new strings will pacify our relationship.

A friend of mine recently sent me the 1946 movie Humoresque. I enjoyed it tremendously, and I highly recommend it to any violin-player!

My condolences to anyone affected by the Asian tsunami disaster. Our thoughts and prayers are with you all.

From Thomas Schon
Posted on January 28, 2005 at 3:18 PM

I am looking since a time on your website and it is interesting to know and to learn anything about violinists.

So I am creating a hughe database of composers/musicians,
meanwhile 84,000. I am not so interested about a complete information of these composers, therefore are existing dictionaries and so on where people might be informed.

My goal is to know and to learn about the connections between teacher/student composers/musicians. Till to day I have made interested discoveries in the world of composers/musicians.

To your information, I have traced till to day abt 1900 violinists of all times.

The violinists plays for me a big role in my database, there are just a few names, which i can not trace. Maybe the spelling is not correct

- Dowing; Alvay; Ponay
- Shinner; Robjohns

May be there is somebody who might help me?

Just to information, there was anyonme who wrote who were the teachers of Galamian.

Well the teachers are Capet and Mostras.

Galamians students were :

Arzewski, Cecylia
Bachmann, Maria
Barbosa, Vasco
Buswell, James
Chung, Kyung-Wha
Czerkov, Ivan
Fodor, Eugene
Kavafian, Ani
Korsten, Gerard
Laredo, Jaime
Perlman, Itzhak
Rabin, Michael
Sarbu, Eugene
Tellefsen, Arve
Zukerman, Pinchas

Holmes, but which Holmes (Henry or Alfred ???)

Thanks form the Netherlands

From Scott 68
Posted on January 28, 2005 at 4:06 PM

i think rabin did the music for humoresque

From Emily Liz
Posted on January 28, 2005 at 9:38 PM

Actually it was Isaac Stern who played for "Humoresque". Michael Rabin played violin for the Liz Taylor melodrama "Rhapsody".

From Scott 68
Posted on January 28, 2005 at 10:22 PM

aaah

memory is the first thing to go dag nabbit

This entry has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.