Well, on Monday we begin our season with our first Classical series concert. It feature Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring under the direction of Carlos Kalmar. We recorded the Rite (along with the Firebird) under James DePreist a couple years ago, and I performed it at Peabody several years before that, and with the National Orchestral Institute under Yoël Levi in 1990. So, after next week, I will have performed the Rite about ten times. I still remember the terror of trying to keep the meter straight in the Danse Sacrale while Levi stared at seemingly everyone in the string section at once. At least I wasn't the tuba player! Talk about pressure! When I come back to this piece after these fourteen years, I'm struck by how much easier it seems. It's a strange thing, the how the process of learning music in an orchestra changes from youth orchestra to college to professional life. In youth orchestra, you work on a program for about three months, rehearsing between one and three times a week, then you play the concert one time. You have a lot of time to get to know new pieces, to really fall in love with them. In college, the process is fast-forwarded a bit: you rehearse for maybe six to eight weeks for each program, but you rehearse at least three days a week - and there's a whole heck of a lot more going on in your musical life at this point. Orchestra has become (for most at conservatory) a necessary evil, a task to be done and then forgotten on the way to your juries and recitals. When you reach the professional realm, you rehearse for three days, for a total of four to five rehearsals, then you perform for a further three or four days, depending if the orchestra does a runout concert or not. Talk about whiplash! From three months down to seven days at most. I was very surprised when, about two months into my first season in the OSO, I was not able to remember what pieces I had played during that first two months! A lot of music, very little time!