november 3

I'm back!

You must forgive me for neglecting my blog posting duties these past couple of weeks. We've been extremely busy at the Studio and finding the time and energy to write has been nearly impossible. I've attempted to write a couple of times, but I'm usually too exhausted from practicing or a long day of class to come up with anything interesting to write about. Believe it or not, seven hours of practicing turns brains to oatmeal by the end of the day. At least that's what it feels like.

We just got back to the Dairy after a wonderful dinner at The Five Bells in Brabourne, a town just a few miles from Elmsted. We had a repertoire class today, so having someone else cook dinner and clean the dishes was especially nice, even if we did have to pay. It's hard to practice (or do anything productive) after class days, so now Adrian, Jhen Wei and I are just hanging out...listening to Denis Bouriakov... :)

In the past two weeks, we've gone to London twice to go to masterclasses at the Royal Academy by William Bennett (last week) and Emily Beynon (this week). Wibb's class was great, of course, and it was very interesting to hear the students at RAM. Emily Beynon's class was fantastic though! I've never seen her before, but I thought she had a great personality and some really wonderful things to say about the music. And she's stunningly beautiful, just like her playing. She gave a concert tonight at Wigmore Hall, but we didn't go because we will be seeing her play in Rome in December. I would have liked to have gone, but trips to London get expensive, especially when you take as many as I've been taking recently!

Not too much else has been going on here. I've never practiced so much in my life or had so much to practice, but I love it. And this month is looking even busier than October... Patricia Morris is coming toward the end of the month to give a piccolo class, which means I've got some piccolo practicing to do! And Juliet Edwards is coming back on the 25th for another sonata class and we're preparing for our Christmas concert. We're playing quite a lot of pieces on the concert and I'm the lucky one who gets to play the bass flute for the majority of the program. Yay! Better start doing some push-ups.... :P

Going back to London tomorrow morning to go to Just Flutes, so I better get some sleep and stop here. I forget about all the interesting things worth writing about when I wait so long to post, so I'll try to post again soon.

:)