Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

I've now been discharged from the Royal Free's physiotherapy service. It'd been a few weeks of no pain in the wrist, no major discomfort. Of course, no sooner I was discharged, maybe with the weather change, the wrist started hurting again. I can play but seem to have reverted to some hand positions being painful. May have to go through various bits of advice I had been given by various people on what my options may be for having this looked at and looked into.

Curiously, the whole thing has resulted in loss of playing function in my right hand (the affected wrist is my left's) probably because I had stopped practising for a couple of months -I've been slowly working on recovering control on my ring finger, on tone and velocity in general, which I feel I had lost somewhat. I expect that'll increasingly be the case as years advance, that it will take ever more effort to keep in playing condition and retain my capabilities as a player. I already had observed that I cannot play remotely as fast as I could even ten years ago -but that is to be expected, your physical capabilities as a player peak around the 30 years of age and slowly decline thereafter -although that wasn't quite the case for me as I started so late and at that point was only beginning to get into the swing of things and learn what I was doing.

Thinking of doing a couple of short recitals in January (I don't think I can as yet contemplate a full-on full programme, which would require me to practise four hours a day or so). About 40 min of music, half of the programme being those preludes by Ponce I've been putting videos and sound clips of on Youtube and SoundCloud; not as demanding as Bach's Chaconne, for instance, but beautiful and satisfying to play and listen to.

Once more I'm playing a summer garden recital at the Rustique Café in Tufnell Park on Thursday the 16th at 7:30 pm. More details at the event page, here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1472239836401979/



Please let me know if you are able to make it.

Rather disappointed with the attendance for last night's recital. A bit bothered too with the strange group dynamics of facebook. Why do people say they will attend an event when they very likely know they won't be able to make it or it just isn't their thing? I know things can happen and people can fall ill, etc. but this cannot explain why somebody who knows they have an exam/job interview the next morning, etc, or are in a country four thousand miles away on the day will put themselves as attending the event.

I was rather pleased (at the time) with my playing, although there were flaws. We'll see whether I still am when I see the recordings. The hall was comfortable to play in and had a good sound. As a fund-raiser, both for me and for the charity, it was a complete flop. For now, I'll have to re-think how to do this and also, given the many many hours of work it takes to put one of those, whether it really is worth the while.