Flute

Written Nov 15, 2022, tagged under post

Today I'm going off on a different tack. Last night, looking at diaries etc, I realised that my upcoming flute solo with my local orchestra is an awful lot sooner than I had been thinking. This subject is now occupying quite some mind space!

Our orchestra has a number of concerts through the year, each one of which is preceded by around 8-10 weeks of rehearsals, on a Thursday evening. Checking diaries, I discovered that the next concert is on 26th November, ie 11 days from now as I write. And the following concert is the one I'm performing in, so rehearsals start this month!

The piece I'm performing is actually a rather lovely mid-twentieth-century piece - Poulenc's Sonata for flute and piano), which was rather later handily arranged for flute and orchestra in the 70s by another big gun in the flute world - Lennox Berkeley. Listening to it on Spotify, I am happy that I made a good choice. It's a bit tricky in parts, though!

My solution to getting up to speed is basically to get some flute practice in every day. I am getting more successful at this now, although it's taken this sudden sense of imminence to really kick things into action.

The big challenge at this point is to manage the timetable and logistics etc to get this to work. Lots of the piece is high and loud, which means I make a bit of a racket. Therefore I have to practise in my shed at the end of the garden, and hope the neighbours don't get too snotty. During the day / early evening is tricky, but I should probably try to do that instead, to get it out of the way earlier.

Unfortunately my natural tendency is to leave it until late, and end up getting to bed after I really want to. When I don't start until 10:30, it's almost inevitable, but I always end up paying the price the next day, so this is the habit I'm trying to break.

I am a bit concerned that my flute also needs a bit of mechanical attention, and that this might take some time out of my rather tight practice schedule. I need to look into this over the next few days. I will be looking at London flute workshops soon, but I imagine I'll go back to All Flutes Plus as they were good last time I needed some maintenance done.

In the past, when I've worked towards performances like this, I have occasionally recorded things for reference and put them on SoundCloud. Perhaps I'll do the same here, to give me some points of comparison and (hopefully) show myself I'm making some progress.

Photo by Rajesh Kavasseri on Unsplash