Good morning everyone! If all the technology is correct this will go out to all of you who are my Facebook friends – I hope you will take a minute and to read this and check out  my new website. As part of my Journey of 100 performances of this amazing piece of music (Chaconne for Solo Violin) I am performing this morning at LaGuardia High School for Music and Art, a wonderful school in NYC where many many musicians and artists received their early training. It is challenging to keep this performance project moving during recent weeks at the MET…

A very gratifying experience for me, and the listeners as well, I believe.  There were about a dozen people who had prepared for the performance through Yoga and guided Meditation. Performance was good…my work done a week or so ago on the ending (mentioned previously) really has held and shaped it well.  I think I want to work through the first and second sections with a very defined rhythmic groove  and see if it focuses the form a bit better.  I suspect that as I have been exploring freedom in the variations I may be losing power from focussing the…

Nice intimate audience; great colleagues on this program organized by guitarist Sean Harkness, who was a wonderfully supporting colleague to me, singer Carole Demas, pianist Ian Herman, singer/guitarist Ellis Paul and a curiously funny comic whose stage name is even curioser: Brute Force.  I was very pleased with the flow of a number of segments of the Chaconne: the  three-tones on A sequence (in the major section) and the build to the end from the return to D minor where I was really able to hold back and hold back and then release the stored anticipation.  Additionally the most difficult variations…

It was nice to be able to plug back into this world amidst the weeks of opera (and Firebird rehearsals for Sunday’s upcoming Carnegie Hall Concert with the orchestra). I prepped a bit in the afternoon, starting with the last section (return to d minor).  The location was somewhat overly resonant, so tempos had to be scaled down accordingly.  Today I explored pulling more directly (harmonic rhythm)  from the 3rd beat into the 1st beat of the measures in a number of the variations.  I think one could organize this sort of treatment (and others) into a distinct vocabulary…all part of…

#8)  Better than last night. Still need to craft a better working method for developing the right internal balance between rhythmic groove and rhythmic freedom.  Nice to play the same work, with the same bow and violin, in a larger more sound-friendly space.   A moving experience for my audient.

This was the first performance for me since the MET season started. I felt as if I was operating at about 80-odd %  of optimal   –  small flaws, touching in and out of depth as opposed to living in the depth of the music…humbling to recognize the increased degree of preparation to perform at 100+% in front of a small group of people when in the midst of the opera season.  Definitely more mental and musical effort in preparation is required than the 15-20% difference between 80% and 100%.  Causes me to remember a comment made to me by…