a modern vibrato

Absurd, isn't it. I drove to the rehearsal - a half hour journey - feeling excited about getting into the music. But as I got closer, I felt my stomach turning to butterflies, then melted butterflies, and then just a nugget of frozen butterfly blob lying in the bottom of my gut.

I hate sight reading. I am rubbish - beyond rubbish at it. And so of course the first rehearsal is bound to be stressful. Except that I wasn't sight reading at all. I downloaded pdfs of the full score of the two pieces we were rehearsing first, sliced the flute line off and re-created the whole part to get a head start.

So I should be feeling fairly confident that my "sight reading" is going to be pretty good actually, right? Tell that to my body. Having quieted the butterflies (by melting and then freezing them!) I was the picture of control when rehearsal began. But then the conductor turned up.

A terrifying figure, our conductor expresses distain and annoyance with a variety of flavours of glaring, eyebrow manoeuvres and sarcasm. He doesn't do pleasure - the absense of any of the aformentioned would give you the feeling of a job well done.

So in he comes, and up comes the first piece of music to rehearse. At the concert we will be playing 3 pieces. They are Haydn's Symphony 101 (the clock), Schumann's 4th Symphony, and the "Wand of Youth" second suite by Elgar. In all three pieces there is the standard woodwind complement - 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons. In two of these pieces I am playing 2nd flute, but in one - the Haydn - I am playing 1st flute.

As murphy's law would have it, he puts the Haydn up first, and as I lift my flute up, I realise that I am now quivering with nervous tension. The first few bars are all soft, sustained, high notes. Mine come out like a stammering vibrato. My heart is racing, and my lungs are running out of air. My nerves are not doing my playing ANY favours at all. I am almost panicking, and I just can't make myself calm down!

The first run through is non stop - we don't pause to correct things no matter how many F sharps appear, or B flats don't. During the first section I get three eyebrow gathers and one pursed lips aimed at me but he decides to continue on. Luckily I manage to get through the rest without the quivering vibrato haunting me. I start to feel slightly normal again.

Then we go back to pick it apart. We do the first section so many times trying to get it soft SOFT SOFT that my lungs start to collapse inward. I know what I am going to be practising at home most - not the fast passages, but these long notes! They are killing me. I feel as if my lungs have become denser than normal.

An hour goes by with the over-loud ticking of the clock being drowned out by the eyebrow wrinkling, eye rolling and glaring of the conductor. Finally we stop for a tea break.

I can't believe how physically worn out I felt after an hour of rehearsal, but it was all because of the tension in me, I must have engaged every muscle in my body and held them in tight for the whole hour. And all because I was scared of messing up solos in rehearsal and getting the glare or the eyebrow. And at the heart of that, I wasn't confident in my own ability.

I think I need to do two things - one is work out how to control my nerves and ensure that they don't effect my sound by adding a all over vibrato, and the other is to practise the whole thing so much that I can play it backwards in my sleep with my toes. Because there is a glimmer of truth in the confidence comment - I didn't play properly for 12 years. It was just over a year ago that I joined a local concert band and started practising again. It was only last term that I was asked to join this orchestra to play 3rd and 2nd flute in the last concert.

I know that my technique has degraded, and I need to get it back, but more damaging is my mind telling me before I even try - that I am going to mess it up.

I adore the piece by the way - it's such a lovely bit of music, and I am really looking forward to performing it. Even if I need to leave my brain at home just to stop it putting me off!