Christmas!

My favorite Messiah to play is at the Unitarian Church of Berkeley. The conductor, Bryan Baker, dresses up like Handel!

Wow- Christmas is already here. Unbelievable. We have inlaws in town. They are even in house. Help! No- just kidding. I really enjoy Scott's parents. Probably more than he does!

I have a Christmas Eve midnight mass to play, and then a church service on Christmas morning. After that, Isabelle and I are off to Lake Tahoe to ski. (If we can get over the pass!) It should be fun.

Not too many concerts coming up. Isabelle and I have two benefit concerts though. They are both for the Aids/Lifecycle series, to benefit the San Francisco Aids Society. One is on January 24th in Berkeley and the other is on March 14th. You can certainly check my calendar on my webpage at http://www.marciebrown.com/ to find out details. These are variety shows. Isabelle and I get to go first because they don't start until 7:30 at night. I am not sure what we will play yet. She might sing this year. But definitely we'll do some cello duets also. We are working on some great Irish music, so maybe we'll put some of that on the program. Isabelle is now working on Suzuki Book 3. She has learned the first two compositions and she is playing beautifully. But, as always, it is still a challenge to get her to practice. We pretty much try to practice every day, except on Sunday, when she gets the day off from cello.

The big surprise recently has been her vibrato. We talked about it a little bit this summer. She just started shaking her arm one day at the Colorado Suzuki Institute after watching some of the other kids doing it. Her teacher at the institute, David Evenchick, told me to just really exaggerate my vibrato when I played my cello around her. So I did that, and she now has developed this really great vibrato. I haven't told her anything about how to do it---I only encouraged it and told her how beautiful it sounds. She is very proud of that vibrato. Vibrato, at age 6!

The other big concert coming up is on Friday, February 13th at the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto. It's a really nice concert series in this beautiful theater. I am playing there with Ramana Vieira and her Ensemble, my Portugese fado band. We are excited about it. We have a new CD that is almost out now, and a new record company, Pacific Coast Jazz, that is promoting it. We are also on the prowl searching for the right booking agent for the group. To find out more about that group, go to http://www.ramanavieira.org/ .