The more I play

The more I play the more I want to play. Last night I spent quite a bit of time playing and then listening to the Bach A minor. This morning I got up and all I could think about was that concerto. I suffered through listening to it on my iPod radio thingie that just doesn't work well in this area on the way to work, but it was still divine. I have to practice that B flat note in the second movement that is a semi-breve (half-note) in a movement where the speed is andante and it's counting quavers (eighth notes) not crotchets (quarter notes), so the semi-breve is painfully long. I have to sustain it, and measure out my bow carefully, and produce a sweet tone, and vibrato regularly so it's beautiful, not ugly. Tricky.

Coding news

In other news, my Spring 2.5 book came, which is exciting. So far I have really enjoyed Spring as a platform, and I'm looking forward to expanding my understanding of it. Now I have a bit more time it looks like, I should be able to find the time to study the book and get up to speed on some of the other useful features of Spring other than just Dependency Injection.

More on Bach

Tonight I managed to limp my way through the whole first movement along with Itzhak and his Orchestra. I am dead pleased. I dropped in a couple of places, but picked it back up again within a bar or two. Still much work to do, but I can at least hit most of the notes in a row. My hand started aching after that so I stopped, though I would really like to play along with the second and third movement. I've been practising the wild string crossing bit in the third movement which I just find awesome, although on all the recordings I've listened to (three so far) all you really hear is the soloist hitting the E string and some indistinguishable notes in between, which is sad really because the notes are so pretty. Maybe it's attributable to newer steel strings where an open string now sounds so bright it drowns the other strings where you are in around 5th position and so it sounds a bit muted, even on Itzhak's Strad. I wonder if there was a recording of a person on a baroque violin with gut strings it would be different. I'll have to see if I can find John Holloway doing it, he usually plays a baroque violin.