Happy New Year and new season of Stand Partners for Life!
In this episode, we take a look back at resolutions we've made about our playing... and not all of them stuck!
From scale practice to solo Bach, counting rests to keeping a practice journal, each of us had critical moments in our violin past where we made fateful decisions. Which ones made a lasting impact?
Transcript
Nathan Cole: Hello and welcome back to Stand Partners for Life. I am Nathan Cole.
Akiko Tarumoto: I am Akiko Tarumoto.
Nathan Cole: Well, since this is the new year, happy new year and happy second season of Stand Partners for Life! We released our first 15 episodes last year and had a blast doing it, and kind of took a long summer break that extended into the holidays. Now we're ready to get going again, so this is the perfect day to get back into the spirit of podcasting.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yes, get back into the swing of thinking about music.
Nathan Cole: Tomorrow we actually go back to work after our holiday break, that being the LA Philharmonic. Actually if you were with us last season, you'll know that we spend our days and many of our nights with the LA Phil at Disney Hall here in Los Angeles. If you're joining us, this is what we call "The secrets of the symphony from two violinists who live together, play together and work together", because we are married with three young kids here in the house, who should all be sleeping. Although, I sort of hear that they're not.
Akiko Tarumoto: It might be our neighbors.
Nathan Cole: Are they out reveling?
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah, I think it makes more sense that kids would be up acting rowdy because they're not even four. In the case of the neighbors, they don't have that excuse, because I think that guy's in his 20s.
Nathan Cole: They do have a hot tub.
Akiko Tarumoto: They do, well yeah or something, a trampoline.
Nathan Cole: We give you an inside look at the symphony and the life of, well, the life with the violin. In that spirit we're not going to give you a whole bunch of new year's resolutions exactly. My idea anyway was that we'd talk today about some playing resolutions, practicing resolutions that we'd made over the course of our lives and see what stuck and what didn't. I did want to …
Akiko Tarumoto: What stuck and what stunk.
Nathan Cole: Okay, that's good, that's better. I wanted to thank each and every one of you for listening and especially those of you who have gone and left us a rating or a review on iTunes. It's the best way for us to get found and hopefully enjoyed by other listeners like you. If you have a moment and can go to standpartnersforlife.com, you'll see how you can visit iTunes and just take those 60 seconds to leave us a review. I read all of them. I don't think you read any of them, right?
Akiko Tarumoto: No, I can't handle the truth.
Nathan Cole: Well what I was going to say is that so many of the reviews, I've told you this a couple times, but they really feel like people go out of their way to mention that really enjoy the commentary. Especially Akiko's! What they'll say is, "I especially like hearing what Akiko has to say." I try not to take that personally.
Akiko Tarumoto: Well I get to be the person who sort of riffs off of you, I think you're the straight man, so it's not entirely fair probably.
Nathan Cole: I think people trust you, they know you speak the truth.
Akiko Tarumoto: Well thank you, I appreciate it.
Nathan Cole: We read them all. Well anyway, I read all of them and I pass them along to Akiko.
Akiko Tarumoto: He doesn't pass on the bad stuff.
Nathan Cole: Here we are, we've got our resolutions. I just remembered -- I said I wasn't going to do this, but I think one of my only resolutions I thought of for the new year as far as music is to play our kids more concerts. To have them watch and listen to more concerts, because they really do seem to enjoy it.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah, and that's a resolution I forgot on my part too is that, couple of months ago -- I don't want to say I rediscovered my affection for classical music, because that makes it sound as if I didn't like classical music for a while or something like that. That's not it at all, but yeah, I came up with a similar thing for myself, just to make classical music a bigger part of my life outside of work.
Nathan Cole: In what way, listening?
Akiko Tarumoto: I guess it's mostly taking the form of listening. It's mostly what we do I guess when we're not at work, as we're driving around, getting places in LA. Putting classical music on the radio has been great, even pieces that -- I wouldn't have thought I'd ever pick a Corelli sonata out of the air and say, "I'm dying to listen to that." It's been great hearing it and especially great when our kids are in the car to hear it. It's kind of interesting.
Nathan Cole: This is satellite radio yeah?
Akiko Tarumoto: Yes, Sirius. The only thing about Sirius -- and if anybody's in a position to do something about this -- we can never tell who the performer is on Sirius and so it can be a little annoying.
Nathan Cole: Right, unless you listen till the end, in which case it's like when we were growing up.
Akiko Tarumoto: Beginning or the end, yeah. We even tried looking online while it's happening and you can't.
Nathan Cole: Yeah, they tell you the piece, but not who's performing.
Akiko Tarumoto: Which -- it's hard for me not to read into that some kind of nefarious overlooking. The important thing is the performer is a really important part of this. Probably these days it's getting a little bit less, people would rather know what the piece is maybe than who's playing it. But there are a lot out there who really, really want to know who's playing.
Nathan Cole: I know, it's been a fun guessing game sometimes.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah.
Nathan Cole: Well you remember that from childhood right? I mean I don't know if your parents did this, but mine …
Akiko Tarumoto: They did. My mom is actually surprisingly good at it.
Nathan Cole: Oh, but I meant if you really couldn't tell who the performer was and the piece wasn't over yet, would you get where you were going (like the grocery store) and sit in the car and wait till the end of the piece to find out?
Akiko Tarumoto: No, I don't remember doing that. In fact my mom had a weird aversion to listening to classical music in the car. She still does.
Nathan Cole: I mean it can be annoying, right because the dynamic range is so …
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah, because of road noise. Anbd we always had a cheap car that had like no sound proofing or anything. And the sound system was probably something really terrible, but yeah. Anyway, so we never played that game. Yeah, we would just do it at home. She's like, "Oh I bet this is Joshua Bell."
Nathan Cole: Well 80% of the time you're right, because he's on Sirius all the time.
Akiko Tarumoto: He is on Sirius, yeah he is. There is a great Bernstein West Side Story recording, I assumed it was him.
Nathan Cole: Yes, that is a great one.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah, it was really good.
Nathan Cole: Now how did we get talking about Sirius? Oh because of wanting our kids to listen more. Over this holiday break especially, they've discovered The Nutcracker.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah. I've confessed that I've never been a huge Tchaikovsky fan as you know. A lot of colleagues, I think -- you bring up Tchaikovsky -- say, "I could live the rest of my life without playing any of his symphonies," or at least any of them except for Six.
Nathan Cole: Shout out to former guest Brant Taylor.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah.
Nathan Cole: Our colleague in the Chicago symphony.
Akiko Tarumoto: Boy I miss Brant, I do. Listening to The Nutcracker, of course, it sounds ridiculous -- it's great music and sometimes you need to be reminded, just watching your kids responding to pieces you can tell it gets to them immediately. Also, there's dancing and there's a visual element to it that's attractive, but the music really speaks to them.
Nathan Cole: It does and actually before they saw (because they've just over the last couple of days been watching the film version) what did we look up? It's from 1993 with New York city ballet and Macaulay Culkin in one of the starring roles. Before they actually saw that, we were just listening to the LA Phil's. The LA Phil has a new recording of the complete Nutcracker.
Akiko Tarumoto: It only took six years.
Nathan Cole: Six years though to get released.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah.
Nathan Cole: Yeah, I opened the CD booklet to see who was playing. A lot of new faces since then, but yeah, new Deutsch Grammophon recording. We had it on in our van and yeah, the kids, I mean they were just, "What's this number? What's this number?" They would make up stories about what was happening and it's before they saw any of the dancers, so they've enjoyed watching the movie over the last couple of days. Yeah, that's something I hope to continue. We've got that Berlin digital concert hall.
Akiko Tarumoto: Oh definitely. Yeah, they do like that. There's an occasional call for "Not this song!" but mostly they like it. It's been amazing. We have a DVD player in our car -- "bleep" DVD because it sounds like it's really 2005.
Nathan Cole: Hey, it plays Blu-rays too.
Akiko Tarumoto: Yeah, we have one and I'm ashamed to say that for a while it was kind of a crutch. Pretty much any time we were in that car they would want a movie and we'd put it on or something. Then I thought, you know what,...
