Clarinetfest 2014 Part 2

Thursday was when our clarinet choir would be performing. We thought we'd have an hour to rehearse that morning, but found out we would only have 20 minutes. Yikes! Upon learning that, we all made sure to get there about 15 minutes early to buy ourselves some extra time (our rehearsal was in the morning, so no one else was using the room before us). One of our pieces requires an Ab clarinet (even smaller than an Eb), which no one in our group has so we'd always just transposed the part for another Eb. But for this performance we were able to get Dave Gould to bring his Ab and play the part for us.

Anyway, after rehearsing I spent about half an hour quickly checking out the vendors, then headed back to the music buildings to listen to a couple of recitals. Then it was back to the hotel to rest until it was time to head to my own concert. Our group would be competing against a Larry Combs/Julie DeRoche masterclass, so we weren't anticipating a large audience (some of us were even hoping for a small audience). But our director and his wife know lots of people, and Sean Osborne was playing before us, so between people just hanging out after the previous concert and the people our director knows, we actually ended up with a decent-sized audience. Overall, the performance went well. I honestly can't say how all my stuff came off - my hands and keys were feeling sticky despite the air conditioning, so I felt like that was slowing me down and definitely contributed some nerves to the whole thing for me. But it seemed well-received and Larry Sobol told me I played beautifully as did everyone in the group (I'm doubtful about this, think they're all just being polite, and will feel better when I have a lesson in a month and our director is honest with me and lets me know everything I did wrong).

Most of us were pretty wiped out after the performance. I was going to give someone a ride to a store afterward, but we ran into some others who were headed to Whole Foods and opted to ride along with them. We were all feeling a need to eat some salad/vegetarian food to offset the fried food. By the time we were done there it was time to meet up with the rest of our group at a restaurant to celebrate our performance. We got there a bit late and I just about died when I saw what they'd ordered - an ice cream dessert that was, you guessed it, fried.