Sunday 10 July 2011

Eugene Onegin

Blimey.  It's been a while...  I've been busy with "real life", rather than music.  However, I've just come off a run of Eugene Onegin (from a reduced orchestral version, "Pocket Opera"?  something like that), and have a couple of bits to highlight.

Note that this is a combined cello & bass part.

Shall we begin at the beginning?


See that first note? Doesn't look like much, just a piano pizzicato D that you could do on an open string, but that's the only thing starting this opera off. You have been warned. We're quite fortunate with this score in that the bass part is independent from the cellos in some quite critical areas; nor are we always doubling the bassoons, or filling in non-existent brass parts (though at one point, someone has inked in a 4th horn part to play!)

Not a particularly taxing moment, there. Let us move forward to the beginning of the second number, the "Chor und Tanz der Schnitter", the bit where the strings come in after an unaccompanied chorus:

That's a fairly brisk "Adagio" - about as quick as you can comfortably pizz.  (Ignore the double bar there - that's me being lazy...)

That's pretty much it for unpleasantness, at least in the version we did - there were a couple of small cuts, including one bit that looked horrendous for the cellists!

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