One of the things I love about working with advanced students (my studio is about 2/3 semi pros) is that they keep me in touch with the gnarliest parts of the repertoire. Just today, I’m getting to revisit Beethoven 6, Brahms double, and

…oh no. Popper Nº 29.

Not that I have anything against it, but it’s one of three Popper Höhe Schule examples that I simply haven’t studied. At all! It happens to feature a lot of thirds, something that is just plain hard on a stringed instrument. Oh, and these are in thumb position. Sigh. This is not going to get into my hands over the course of a week. But the purpose of Popper is to install the right software to ready us for the repertoire, and I am excited to really start work on it. After an initial pass through the pages, I went to YouTube to see what the final result should look and sound like. Studying Popper in particular is helped by a visual demonstration, because he always has a few very particular things in mind, and some are not obvious until you’ve spent a week, for instance, playing spiccato when the actual instruction is sautillé (cries in solidarity with all victims of Nº27)