This week was the first week I felt I really returned to my own projects, projects which are increasing in size and scope with every breath.  I’m revising the Belle book entirely, writing and rewriting about a dozen other scripts and treatments and book proposals, and most immediately creating 3 different friend’s reels:  Jude and Leslie’s for acting and Adrian (and mine) for the Vancouver design project.  I know that things will settle — certain projects will fade to the back burner and others will dominate — but I easily have enough creative work possibilities in front of me at this exact moment to fill up the next five years of my life.

Last week I also started practicing again and to my surprise, when I returned to my much larger collection of sheet music in my bookcase in LA, found that all the Mozart practice had indeed “cleaned up” a lot of the other pieces I hadn’t been practicing.  I guess, even more simply put, actually practicing the piano has made me a better pianist.  (Sometimes the obvious is still startling.)

Last week I began learning new sonatas, beginning in typically perverse backwards fashion, with the last ones first.  Somehow, those are sitting very well under my hands — surprisingly so, sometimes.

Today I was again struck by how by far the most difficult passage for me in the beautiful K310 are those moments where the melody travels into the left-hand.  That’s not always tricky for me, but somehow here it is, perhaps because the right hand has to keep one of those tinkling trills going.  Even if you don’t read music you can see a similar wave of notes in the top staff for two measures, echoed in the lower staff two measures after that.  In measure 17 you can see two full measures of the trill symbol which perfectly reflects that ornamental fluttering of the right hand.;

In theory it should be easy to switch the melody into the left hand — the right hand is more or less on autopilot — but somehow I find it hard to negotiate.  There’s some metaphor here for me about balancing my projects and/or my life, but it eludes me.  I just know I have to keep practicing it and somehow the melody will continue to find its way out of the confusion of that which glitters and distracts.

And for those of you who are interested, here’s the video from the Vancouver project, along with my beautiful friend Leslie and her gorgeous family.  You’ll get to see the before and after transformation of the house and hear a little of that very sweet Lalo trio in C minor David Bowie loves but describes as “sentimental” in the HUNGER (but then again, he is a vampire.)

Vancouver Before & After, Christmas 2009