Friday I headed into Kevin’s viola lesson with the camcorder to record him; we need to send in a CD for him to receive a seat placement in the orchestra and be considered for the viola solo.
Kevin is playing, his instructor, Jon, is instructing, I’m recording when asked. Remain, to this day, amazed at how well Kevin handles the very fast notes…unlike other auditions, these pieces have long stretches of nothing but really fast movements and that’s always been a strength of his. So that’s good.
But, I’m sitting there, during the second of the three pieces I’m going to tape, and I have to ask “Why aren’t you using vibrato on some of the notes?”. I’m very puzzled by this…Kevin knows, he knows(!) that not using vibrato is what sunk his last try out.
Puzzled look from Kevin, Jon very quickly says, yeah, Kevin, if you add that in these places it will sound a lot better. And he adds it on the few long drawn out notes there are and the piece sounds a lot better. Tape the second piece, tape the third, Kevin thinks he’s done and I force him to do the first one over again with vibrato in it.
Kevin and I have an unpleasant talk when we get home….what is he doing? How come he isn’t doing this basic thing to make his sound so much better? Do we need to switch instructors…..Jon realizes it’s important, he said at one point during the recording “Advanced students use vibrato all the time”. Kevin gets frustrated with me; I can only point out the bad, not the good, etc, etc, storms out in a huff.
We’ll see how Kevin places; he’s hoping for sixth chair or better…almost every other viola is older than him (some are juniors and seniors in high school) so, his parents expectations are set appropriately. Very strange to think that in a few months he leaves (June 12) and we won’t see him again for a month.
