Ayden and Sander performed their Book 4 & 5 recital together. Quite an accomplishment, as the level of responsibility for this recital is quite a bit more than students have had previously! Please enjoy their reflections on the experience.

~from Ayden

This book 4 & 5 recital is very different from all my past recitals. It not only encompasses two Suzuki books, but also student-led responsibility. We are responsible for working on all joint pieces preparation and making plan independently without parent involvement. I had to organise multiple practice times together with Sander for our joint pieces before joint lessons. During this process, we encountered challenges, like how our schedules conflicted and how to make plans on individual practice for areas like tempo, dynamics changes etc. This is especially evident in Bach Double where we needed to pass the melody back and forth, and where we had to phrase different parts together which was difficult to work on.

Reflecting on the book recital, as I had dedicated extra time to commiting quality practice to my solo pieces according to Ms Diane’s comments from lessons. I felt the solo pieces, although at the start had a lot to work on, were not very challenging during the recital. One of my favourite moments during the book recital was having the opportunity to perform the entire Vivaldi Concerto. This became my most memorable solo piece. The Vivaldi Concerto starts from Allegro, to Largo back to Allegro. This big change in mood required me to spend enough time to change the atmosphere before starting. I thought I have done it smoothly during the book recital. Furthermore, I also thought that I had used vibrato and created dynamic contrast well throughout to help set the atmosphere. 

Overall, I enjoyed the process of collaborating with Sander as a new student-led experience and felt our work and dedication towards performing during the recital to be accomplishing and successful.

~from Sander

Looking back on the process as a whole, I have a few large takeaways, a few of which are positive, and a few of which are areas of improvement. 

Firstly, in terms of large ideas, I think that a positive of the recital was how well not only Ayden and I prepared (grew to the occasion to efficiently and effectively do so) and performed the pieces sounding in most cases together. In terms of a large area of improvement that I would note, I think that in many of the pieces, the parts that had previously come out as areas for improvements sounded generally good, however, parts that had not had as much attention seemingly may have had mistakes in them while playing them during the recital, even if they had not in previous practicing.

Moving on into individual piece feedback, going chronologically, I felt that Country Dance was good in terms of the energy that I was able to bring out and character. Overall it felt solid, except for the rhythm section where I kept going back and forth (I suppose that is simply because I was not confident enough with it at the time). 

Next, in terms of Seitz (5.3), the piece overall felt good. I had a special focus on dynamics and character at the beginning, and I felt the articulation of the double stops was sound, however, I did notice that the tempo was not always consistent (i.e. the tempo did not get back to a tempo). 

Further, on Vivaldi (all movements), (similar to what we discussed in lesson) the parts of the piece that we focused on for significant amounts of time no matter if they were challenging or not, seemed to go well. This may have been slightly due to tempo shifts (similar to Seitz). As well, I knew immediately when I started the third movement that I had forgotten to leave the breath in between, even though it had been something we and myself had practiced and tried to internalize. 

Lastly, for German Dance my only notable comment on the piece was that it felt it was going well until I started to, I will say, overthink the fingering, and then it led to the piece sounding partially sloppy and incoherent.