Category Archives: Students

Juilliard Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall with New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert. Fedor Ouspensky

Congrats to Fedor Ouspensky on being honored to perform with Fedor with Alan GilbertAlanGilbert as a member of Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall!

Click on this link to see the New York Times article about the concert

Fedor Ouspensky in Juilliard Journal

Second-year violinist Fedor Ouspensky (Pre-College ’12), who holds Bidù Sayão and Michael and Ethel Cohen scholarships, took the Orchestra Orientation class in its inaugural year.

I took the class last year, and it was great—you start right away with the top-notch conductor coming to you. One unique part of it was that it was the first time I’d gone to orchestra rehearsals and not ever performed the piece in concert that we rehearsed, but that kind of took the pressure off of playing under Alan Gilbert and let us concentrate a lot on different aspects of orchestra playing. I also enjoyed when musicians from the New York Philharmonic gave us coachings about playing in a professional orchestra and what their standards are. Juilliard clearly wants the Juilliard Orchestra to stretch and rise to that level by re-creating that environment.

We learned all sorts of things, especially that you can learn a lot from listening. Looking up from your music stand and listening was the motif of the class. We also learned that the musicians in the back have to play a tiny bit earlier or sometimes louder—in the back we deliver the sound and the power. If you’re thinking individually rather than collaboratively, you can do it, but it’s a lot harder.

To see more go to

Juilliard publication

Listening Log Posts 2016-2017

Dear Students,

Here we are starting a new Blog which is dedicated to our Listening Log. From now on, you are welcome to post your weekly ListeningListening Log Logs here in a form of comment to this blog post. You can choose to continue to bring your paper versions to the lessons, or, you may choose to do a paper one week, then do a post on this website for another week. Either way, each completed Listening Log will earn you a Sticker!

 

You will need to make your posts fit the following format:

Listening Log No.? by (your name)

First piece:

  1. Composer
  2. Title
  3. Composition
  4. Insert a YouTube link or a link from another site if you listened/watched on computer. Skip this step if you listened to radio in a car
  5. Your comments!

Second piece:

  1. Composer
  2. Title
  3. Composition
  4. Insert a YouTube link or a link from another site if you listened/watched on computer. Skip this step if you listened to radio in a car
  5. Your comments!

A fantastic glitch in performance

Two students of Hunter Mill Music Studio on stage!

Selvina Kong, piano

Fedor Ouspensky, conductor

South Lakes High School Orchestra

Please, note at 3:20 a “terrible” glitch! the pianist had a complete black-out memory slip, so devastating that she seemingly lost her place altogether. This is a very common situation for inexperienced (and very experienced!) performers. But keep watching, and pay attention to how much more relaxed and confident she gets after she finally makes a recovery from the event! and how poised and proud she is afterwards receiving the greeting from the audience. And how supportive and enthusiastic are the applause! 

Sure, when you go to a concert presented by professional artists, rarely something of this magnitude happens, but when it does… the audience actually LOVES it even better! Why? Because it makes the artists people, more human, not so much like remote idols covered in the glitter of glory.  Especially if the artist is actually a truly artistic and expressive musician:)

Below watch the recording from the same concert, this time edited. How do you think we get all those absolutely note-perfect recordings on labels? Hmmmmm….