Today it became obvious how hard work conducting is: I woke up early to study Stravinsky Apollon Musagete for the orchestra session - which went very well actually - and after that I had to gather myself to study Ravel La Valse and conduct it with the pianists.

Maja_conducts_pianists.jpg Maja at the piano session

At the break in our piano session maestro Simonov showed me his notes from our first meeting 3 years ago in St Petersburg. It is incredible how organized he is - I remember him writing on his laptop during that master class, but I never would have believed that he has saved all he wrote and was able to dig it out to show it to me today. Apparently he makes a file about every person he is teaching!

Anyway, the comments he made back then were really harsh - his impression of me after the first lesson must have been very bad. On the second day he wrote something positive too: "made progress", "feels the music"... Now, after this master class I will get a couple of pages of notes from these 10 days. That should be interesting!