It was a long, tiring process again, working on such a complex work by Ysaÿe!
We did the last proof-readings already couple of months ago, however, it took longer to make the finishing touches to it.
As the manuscript is quite similar to the corrected “Le Chimay”, I had some really difficult decipherable spots here also. It was also a second, corrected version, having many places with all kinds of corrections, scratched out passages, erased and hardly legible spots and of course tons of missing accidentals.
Here again, it was really useful the playback function feature in Finale. Besides playing on piano, trying the violin and viola parts were also very important to figure out many small details but to hear the complete harmonies and modulations no matter how awful some times it sounds, is a major help. The basic Finale sounds are really not very beautiful but using a better sample library (in this case Garritan) makes it a more reliable and enjoyable solution.
However, there was one absolutely unclear place. I spent many hours to figure it out without success. It was one multi-measure rest of four bars, having a number “2” behind the “4”, with a star and text: “en plus”. There are some corrections at the bottom of the page but no matter how I tried a huge variation of possibilities, I couldn’t get an acceptable result. Finally, I had to leave it and put a GP there.
After all, in general I was happy with the results, so I was starting to look for advertising possibilities and print solutions. Knowing that there are still many musicians who would prefer nicely printed sheet music instead of pdf printouts from their own printer, taped somehow together, I had to find a good printshop. Well, I have one here but unfortunately they were closed for the last three months. But the situation in Germany was different, we could find an excellent print shop with sheet music printing experience, via the Leipzig Opera library.
In the meantime I contacted couple of music magazines hoping that they would make at least an announcement of this new publication. Luckily, both, “Das Orchester” in Germany and “The Strad” here in the UK were interested, the former in a review and The Strad even asked me for a featured article for the March 2021 issue.
I’ve started to collect ideas for this article right the way, going through the trio also to find the most interesting details. While doing this I was suddenly stack, again, at this four bars rest! I just couldn’t deal with the fact that there is no solution for it. And after another many hours search, I found the solution, indeed! There was another spot in the manuscript with another correction I never thought to be for this particular place, and with help of a similar, almost analogue place, I could restore these four measures. A full explanation about this will be in my Strad article.
Finally, after all these years, I could send the new sheet music of both trios to the Juilliard school library, with my gratitude for providing the manuscripts for me.