Teacher has a non-Suzuki book of duets that has second violin parts for almost all of the Suzuki songs.  She couldn’t help but notice that I enjoyed our experience playing last time, so we kicked off yesterday’s lesson by playing two of them.  First up was the Martini Gavotte, the one I have written about concerning my memory struggles.  Well I did look at the music (Teacher says that looking at music is almost always required for chamber music at first), but overall it went great.  Generally speaking, I have been making a good deal of memory progress on the piece and am quite close to declaring that it’s no longer an exception to my Suzuki memorize-every-piece rule.  For the duet, reading music and all, we played right through without stopping.

Next we played the Becker Gavotte, my newest song.  I’ve been working on it since the beginning of December, so it might be the longest I’ve had on a new piece to date.  As I’ve written, it’s quite complex, so it was exciting to be able to play it well enough to get through the duet.  I did not play it as well as the Martini, but it came out well enough; we only had to stop once.  When we finished, Teacher said, “Well, clearly you are ready to go on to the next song.”

So we did.  It happened to be the third Gavotte of the day, my now-new Gavotte, Bach, BWV 1068, the 3^rd movement of his Orchestral Suite in D.  This orchestral suite is quite famous – the notable “Air” is the piece’s second movement.  But movement number three is two back-to-back gavottes, and that’s the movement that the Suzuki series calls simply, “Gavotte.”  It will likely be my longest piece when I get it worked it up; the whole thing repeats as we play through various sections, and then the first gavotte repeats again in its entirety.

Here’s a 2011 performance of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, my new gavotte/s is at about 13:25, but treat yourself to the whole thing:

It’s a magnificent work; the violin part I’m playing is the main melody, so unlike most of the Suzuki pieces, this one is a real violin part for a real piece of music – even down to being in the original key.  I remain totally enamored of getting to play tunes like this at this stage of the game.  This piece will bring my first official double stops, and it also seems designed to get me trilling like a champ.  Overall, trills in the Suzuki repertoire have been relatively few and far between, but in this piece they are everywhere.  Gavotte two looks like it will bring a lot of rhythmic and bowing complexity too.  I’m very excited.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s just one more piece in Book Three after this one – another Bach.  It’s really been mostly a book of Bach – I’m totally fine with that.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan