Learn Reger Viola Suite No. 3 with Me! – Weeks 4 and 5

Welcome to my third blog post on Reger’s third Viola Suite! If you missed the first two, you can find them here! I’ve been vlogging my practice journey as well as blogging it–you can watch this week’s video below! (And there’s a playlist so you can binge watch them all if you want!)

I also just recently performed the entire Suite! You can watch my viola studio’s fall recital here!

WATCH THE VLOG HERE!

My First Studio Performance

I was really happy with my first performance in Studio class! I played just the first movement, but I was able to incorporate a lot of elements I had decided on with my teacher in our lesson the day before, including new fingerings and some timing ideas.

One comment I received was to either make the A and B sections sound very different, or try to make them similar. I’ve thought a lot about it since, and I think making them sound very different is the way I’ll ultimately go.

Beginning the Second Movement

In my fourth week of learning the Viola Suite, I began working on the second movement! The difficulties in this movement are tuning all the thirds and sixths, and making all the different sections work together.

At first I mostly worked on how I want the different sections to sound. Lately I’ve been trying to prioritize the musical phrasing and characters earlier in the learning process rather than focusing on technique first, which is what I usually do. (You’ll hear a lot more about this when I blog about learning the fourth movement!)

To work out the sections, I looked over the music to see what was similar and what was different, and where the sections obviously start and end and where they not-as-obviously start and end.

I also used the dynamics as a guide–Reger used a lot of contrasting dynamics in this movement to help show where the small sections begin and end!

After working out the phrasing, I focused on tuning the chords; particularly the first few, as I want to start the movement on the right note! I had a hard time going between the first few notes because the fourth notes, G and B, and fifth notes, A and C, use different hand shapes since the former chord is Major and the latter is minor. It took a lot of repetition to train my hand how to move correctly! As I practiced going between these two chords, I made sure I was always using the bowing I’ll use when I play everything in context. It makes it a lot easier to put together if you don’t change up what you do with the bow, because otherwise it’s one extra thing you’ll have to relearn later on! Our bow helps us shift, so you want to always shift with the bow!

For the double stops that pop up in the third line, I used my ever trusty finger both notes but only bow one line trick! It really helped train my fingers and my ears.

The last thing I did this week was working on getting the second movement closer to my goal tempo. Building the foundation on phrasing and technique helped me bump up the tempo pretty quickly! I also kept solidifying the first movement, which is still going well!