Viola-in' around

I feel good.

My semester's done. On Tuesday I played a mock orchestra audition that went pretty well. Everything was acceptable- a couple of excerpts were pretty good, actually, and a few were a bit uninspired...

Earlier this evening I played a short recital. The first half was Bach's sixth 'cello suite. When I began the concert the audience was only 4 people - Capella, my teacher, my pianist, and a former student of my teacher who had just had a lesson. I had some trouble settling in & making music... By the fourth movement (the Sarabande- a slow elegant dance) a few more people had come in and that helped a lot. Capella said later that she didn't want the movement to end... which is cool for a few reasons- I was feeling pretty good while I was playing- thinking about how to play each phrase as it happened... so that Capella enjoying it the most means that I wasn't entirely fooling myself.

It made me very happy that some new Toronto friends came and enjoyed the concert. Jim, Anna, and Finn, who we lived with when we first moved up (for a few months, actually- from July to October), their neighbors (who listened to me practice all summer), a friend of Sage's that we met last week finally (hi Sage), and two pop musicians (by which I mean non-classical. not really pop at all, really... ) who are friends of Jim's - all these people came. It was awesome. Jim and Finn came in in the middle, and Finn listened quiet as a mouse until the fourth movement, when he started talking about wanting to go play hockey. Capella and I met Jim and Finn at the park two weeks ago when Finn went skating for the first time.

The second half was a sonata by Julius Roentgen, a Dutch/German composer who lived shortly after Brahms, and is some distant relative of the discoverer of the X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen. And that's how I use my physics degree.

In other news, Nathan and I brewed a batch of beer about two months ago. Last week we finally bottled it, and tried a bottle then (the bottle was a funny shape and the capper wouldn't fit). It was warm, uncarbonated, and tasted like watery Molson with a really nasty kick at the end. Yesterday I put one bottle in the fridge for an hour, and it was good. Not watery, cold, carbonated, and the nasty kick has been largely subdued. I think we'll have a Coor's Lite blind taste test (which should give you a rough idea how it tastes). But it's recognizably beer, which is very, very exciting. And none of the bottles exploded.

Song of the week: (Only Wanna) Brush My Teeth by Mike Evin. One of the sweetest songs I've ever heard. And I'm not just saying that because Mike & Sarah came to my concert tonight.