I just got home from the last rehearsal before our Halloween concert which is next Tuesday.  As some of you know there’s a particular piece of music that has  stymied me.  I practice every night.  Well, almost every night.  I practice at least 30 minutes, usually closer to an hour, and the majority of it is spent on this one piece of music.  Still, as of last night I could not play it at the tempo it demands to be played.

Tonight  we ran through the concert in the order of the performance.  We got to the difficult piece about 8:15 this evening.  We all took a deep breath, and hoped we’d make it through.  At the top of the second page the conductor lowered her baton.  She said she didn’t want to offend anyone, she knew people had put in hours of work, but perhaps we should not put this piece in this concert?  Perhaps it should go in our spring concert.    What did we think?  We all let out a cheer!  YES!  Take this off the program.  Please.  Trust me, no one was offended.  At all.

Relief is a wonderful thing.  The rest of the rehearsal we were all smiles, even the conductor…and she’s usually stressed during our last practice.  We even had time to change the words in a piece that has us singing for a section to include lyrics we made up about the Tigers baseball team.  (You all know of course that the Detroit Tigers are playing in the World Series..don’t you?)

What a wonderful thing…we let a piece of music go and now we can all relax and enjoy the rest of the week instead of practicing an hour every night on the off chance we could have pulled it off.

And the concert next week will be more fun without the weight of that piece hanging over us.  She’s never backed down from anything before, but I’m really REALLY glad she backed away from this one this time.

Whew!  What a relief!