[powerpress]
I recorded tonight’s Kaddish between acts of La Traviata at Festival Opera in Walnut Creek. There aren’t a lot of non-stage places to play where sound doesn’t leak into other stages or houses, so I wound up in a small emergency-exit hallway with nothing but hard surfaces. I was recording with iTalk on my iPhone, which has no input level controls, so I had to play pianissimo to minimize the distortion from high input levels. It was interesting how playing the whole thing as quietly as possible changed the shaping of its phrases for me; with minimal dynamic range, I had to use agogic accents (lengthening notes or inserting slight pauses between notes).