Charlotte write-up

Posted the Charlotte write-up yesterday. Backlog is down to four now.

Scarlatti K.24 is fiendishly difficult, with lots of rapid repeated notes, sixteenth-note double thirds, and wide, lightning-fast hand crossings. Fortunately I had three weeks to learn it, but it was still a bit messy: I should have played it slower. Though my tempo of about 120-132 puts me near the bottom of the range—apparently virtuoso pianists use this as a technical showpiece, judging from the performances on YouTube. This rendition by Veronika Kuzmina Raibaut is jaw-droppingly fast but still clean, crisp, and expressive. It’s an amazing feat, even though a bit aggressive and much faster than I’d play it if I could, which I can’t. 

But I was pleased with my intro, which uses several different motifs from the sonata and has a nice flow, I think.

Tech note: when I set up the website, I did not anticipate how bulky the Concerts page would become, with all the photos embedded in the write-ups. Already with only 8% of all concerts posted, the page takes a good moment to load even with a pretty fast internet connection. And this means that links meant to go directly to a particular point on the page (like the one at the top of this post) may not work right, as the user’s browser tries to guess how far down the page the anchor point will be before all the content above has filled in. I’ll fix this by modifying the site structure so that instead of (eventually) 252 concerts on this one ginormous page, there will be 252 separate pages in the Concerts area. This won’t affect the user experience, except that you won’t be able to browse write-ups by scrolling. Instead, I’ll add a text list of towns to the main Concerts page, so you can find towns alphabetically as well as geographically.