snooze cruise (i'm on it)

It's almost 1 in the morning, and I'm sitting on the floor with a runny nose and bowl of (instant) chicken soup. I never can go straight to sleep after I get home from a concert. Last night I fell asleep hours after the concert and still woke up in the middle of the night with tunes from the program running through my head.
The concerts were with Tel Aviv Soloists, and we were the backup band for this incredible counter-tenor, Andreas Scholl. I'd never been in the presence of a real live counter-tenor, that I know of, certainly wasn't prepared for this big burly German guy to come to the first rehearsal, clear his throat with a deep gutteral growl, and then let loose notes that , ok, enough of the fancy language, are high! Way high. I almost started laughing. Most of the other players were big fans of Mr. Scholl, so I felt very gauche and ignorant. I got used to it, and the performances went well. Maybe the biggest audiences I've seen for this group. Shows the power of opera fans. I thought it would be hard to get big crowds for something this... esoteric. But whatever folks' reaction to a grown man singing in boy soprano territory, the music (Handel and Vivaldi) speaks for itself. And we're very lucky to have gotten to work with him.
I'm just raw, though, worn down from this cold I haven't been able to shake for a week, and stress about my recital, which is coming up in 10 days. So to play this particular music on gut strings with a Baroque bow all felt pretty out of the way for me. This morning the quartet started off rehearsal with our instruments upside down (well, not the cello, the cello's always upside down) to work on the parts of George Crumb's "Black Angels" where we have to play behind our left hands, our bows way up next to the scrolls. Such a cool effect. So disgusting when I can barely play it at all, let alone even close to in tune. The others memorized this piece as their first project as a quartet, and my first time playing it with them will be at another first for me: my first competition. We're playing at the Gaudeamus in Amsterdam, which is just for new music. It's in April. Anyway, after that and work on some sections in the piece in which we imitate insects (musically, not behaviorily) we played through Steve Reich's "Different Trains," another piece the girls put on their first, legendary concert, that I'm doing for the first time. Not for the competition, but at a Kibbutz concert. Playing it through is so intense. It really is a journey, and the viola more than any other instrument plays with the voices on the tape track, all the people telling their stories of where they were during WW2. It's only tiny fragments that are caught ("1941 I guess it must have been," "No more school," and the creepiest one for me to play with, "They shaved us.") and Reich writes out for us his approximation of the voices' rhythms. Speech patterns become melodies that somehow are incredibly, annoyingly catchy. We'll play it with a beautiful video piece, and we'll sit in a row like we're on a train. There are pictures of the quartet's performance of it on the website.
After that, taught. Suzuki, Twinkle, Humoresque. I'm spent now. I'd meant for this to be a musing on the variety of music my day saw. But, really, that's not so remarkable these days. We all are involved in crazy stuff. My friend Judd told me he got a commission from a choir in Rome for a piece involving the Hebrew alphabet. I've gotta hear that one (this is how tired I am- I just typed I gotta here, than I gotta heart) maybe it'll help me actually remember the order.
good night.