Cello Trio, chocolate and scotch

I started playing with a couple cellists from our group (I'll call them Bert & Melissa) and we spent last Saturday afternoon drinking scotch, eating chocolate and playing cello trios! What an awesome way to spend a Saturday afternoon! :)
Hopefully we can keep this going as a reoccurring get-together since we all have fairly busy schedules. We scheduled our get-together at 2pm and we finally called it quits around 6:30ish when we became hungry, but we probably spent a good 1.5 - 2 hours drinking and talking!

I discovered that Bert likes to drink Scotch, and I had started learning to drink scotch recently, so we decided to try out each other's scotch selections. I have to admit that I like the fruity sweeter scotches, and not the peaty or smokey ones.

We paired it with some dark chocolate, which was really yummy! I can never get enough chocolate... or sushi!!! 8). Bert had some super dark chocolate consisting of 80-90% cacoa, while I brought some dark chocolate with a lower cacoa percentage and with different flavors like intense orange, coconut and sea salt. I just really enjoy how it brings out the different flavors in the scotch!

Fortunately for me, Bert and Melissa are stronger players than I am! I'm comfortable playing the lower part, while Bert and Melissa get the more difficult parts (typically 1 or 2). Melissa also plays the violin while Bert plays several instruments (piano, accordion, flute, etc.). I mentioned in my previous post that playing with stronger players helps to improve faster, so this is going to be really great for me! ;)

We sightread through a bunch of trio music and decided to work on the four pieces below to bring back for our next get-together since we liked them the best.

• Bach's Gavotte
• Bach's Sarabande
• Handel's Sarabande
• Lupos' Fantasia

During our playing, I was reminded how much easier it was to read from the score because anytime I read from parts while sight-reading, I tended to skip a line and get lost! I also need to brush up on my terminology since I forgot some of what I learned when I attended CelloSpeak; specifically what first or second system meant!

Anyway, this was really fun so hopefully we can keep this going and play together at least once a month.