Lesson 110 - The thumb

Today's lesson turned out to be one of those "enlightened" one. You know, the ones where you literally exclaim, "OH DUH!" out loud to yourself, usually with both a sigh of huge relief and grin from ear to ear. Wish they came more often!

For as long as I have been playing the cello, the left thumb has been a large annoyance; mostly uncooperative when it came to the abnormal discrepancies of finger lengths on the fingerboard. It was especially difficult trying to find a comfortable and effective playing position whilst training the thumb to be where it should be without invoking claw-like hand gestures. In fact, I've had to forgo the thumb more often than I'd like to admit and have let it come away from the neck when playing to reduce strain and pain. At least, until today.

With the recent relearning of weight balance between the left and the right, it seems I'm now able to let the thumb come back into play whilst still retaining the flexible hand shape over the neck positions. Straight away, the first thing I noticed was an improvement in intonation. A coincidence perhaps? Playing more passages suggests otherwise. Elated, I was suddenly reminded of that masterclass video with János Starker where he advised the cellist to use the thumb to feel the vibrato. Under this new instruction, her eyes widened when she played the passage again and realised exactly what Starker meant.

So hello, thumb. Welcome back :}

We played through many of Feuillard's position changes before returning to Popper. For some reason, we started talking about the cello ego which meandered to Romberg who had a tremendously large one. I'm sure there's a documentary out there about this (will do a search after this!) but it seems the dude only plays his own compositions - in fact, he even rejected Beethoven's offer of a cello concerto! Thank goodness that didn't deter Beethoven to compose some of the most beautiful works for the cello.