Somehow, three months after starting it, I managed to play through the Seitz from memory for Teacher in Tuesday’s lesson, and she declared it passed.  I had to be honest, of course, and told her that particular play-through was the second time ever I’d accomplished the big doubled sixteenth note section of the piece without stumbling.  I have been having a lot of fun working it up, and of course I’ll continue to play it for a long time to come.  I’ve found that moving on from a piece officially can be the best way to improve!

So we went on to the next concerto, my second and Seitz’s Fifth.  It’s the first movement of the work, and it’s quite lovely.  We worked through the first third of it, which ends with a section of triplets that are extremely pretty.  It also contains a fun position shift on the D string.  Overall, this movement has more extended notes, which will allow me to practice my budding vibrato a bit more than the other concerto movement has.  Looking ahead to the end of the movement, it seems I’m headed for another difficult-to-memorize section of sixteenths.  We’ll see how it goes.

It was exciting to start this movement in the lesson – Teacher asked me to sight read, versus playing it for me in advance.  Of course I’ve been listening to it for a while now, so I had the aural assist in that way, but this is the first new piece she didn’t play ahead of me.  My reading is coming along – I still don’t much associate the marks on the page with note names, rather with where to plop my fingers.  It’s not really causing me any problems, but I guess I’d like to work on the note names at some point too.  Playing lovely music remains my goal, so if note names aren’t required for that perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much about it.

After this First movement, the next piece in Book Four is the Third from this Fifth concerto.   Suzuki’s repertoire then abandons Seitz entirely, so if ever I wish to play the full concerto I’ll have to dig up the Second movement on my own.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan