Nepo-who?!?

I'm now into my second session here at Kent/Blossom music festival and I'm starting to get busy. Instead of just one 2-hour rehearsal a day(last session), I have two and tommorrow we start having orchestra rehearsals as well. I'm realizing the need to practice more on my own stuff on top of all of this. I'm not complaining though; I enjoy it very much.

I'm now rehearsing two Mozart flute quartets and a piano quintet by Johann Hummel (this is with bass instead of an extra violin). As there is only one bassist here at the festival (Matt) ,he and I are again working together as we did on the Martinu piece from last session.

Our coach for the Hummel is Jerry Wong, a pianist on the faculty here at Kent State. We had our first coaching with him today and it went well. I really like his sense of musicality and I think that he is a great chamber coach. I'm really enjoying his attention to detail. As one of my former bosses (Tim) would say, "It's the attention to detail that makes all the difference," and in this piece it's the difference between boring and interesting. There's a reason that Hummel's quintet is overshadowed by the much more famous (and more well written) "Trout" quintet that Schubert wrote. But I'm starting to think that we'll make something great out of our performance. We have another coaching tommorrow.

I'm starting to really enjoy the flute quartets as well with our coach Joshua Smith, principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra. Another great musician I get the chance to work with here. I will be performing all three of these works in a week and a half.

Interesting Facts:

1. Hummel's middle name is Nepomuk. Anyone need a baby name? For some strange reason babynames.com didn't have it in their database.
   
   
2. If you google both Schubert and Hummel, Hummel comes up with less than half of Schuberts 1.1 million hits.
   
   
3. I like hyperlinks.