Monday, April 17, 2006

Happy Birthday, David! Yay!

Yes, that's right! David's birthday is tomorrow, April 18th, 2006. He is 39 (for the first time, ha ha, Grandma Ginny), and I made him a chocolate cake from scratch!

It was a lot easier than I feared it would be, and it turned out fantastically! I used the Betty Crocker cookbook that Mimi, my mother in law, gave me for Christmas. That book has come in so handy! It has the best recipes and they're all basic and simple.

Here's David being presented with his cake before being sung to; he is modeling his "I don't want to have my picture taken!" silly face.


I gave him a College of Wooster t-shirt and a COW hooded sweatshirt, two Williams-Sonoma square baking pans, and another present he doesn't know about yet that I'll have to tell you tomorrow after I've presented it to him. ;)

Work continues to go well and with minimal stress; last week was Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet Suite 2, which has great horn parts. Juicy, passionate, tragic, dramatic. Gilbert Varga was our guest conductor. I loved him!! He was so picky and demanding and he got us to do things that we might have otherwise not done, like really making sure people didn't drag (thank god!), that we played as softly as possible in spots to really be dramatic, and even specifying when to use vibrato and when not to (for flutes and violins). I thought the end result was spectacular! Krystof was kind enough to offer to play the Rachmaninoff Pno. Concerto #1 for me, so all I had to play last week was the Prokofiev. The other piece was a Haydn Symphony which only used 2 horns.

This upcoming week should be more challenging; I'm playing in every piece, and we're doing Shostakovitch's 11th Symphony which looks very difficult. I will be listening to my recording of it and studying/practicing my part tomorrow in preparation. We're also doing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Elmar Oliveira. Gerard Schwartz is conducting.

That's all for now - I'm going to go catch the end of the Simpsons with David before wrapping up the day and going to bed. Just wanted to catch up on my blogging! More entries to come, with more pictures! :)

Love to all of you,

Darcy

P.S. If you want to make David's birthday even more special, email him to tell him how great he is! I know I sure am glad he was born...;) dlewellen@earthlink.net

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