"You know, we should make a record of that!"

Isn't the internet great? A minute or two Googling means I can show you what Dr Teeth looks like. (Like, I suspect, most other people, the only one of the Muppets band I remember is Animal the drummer, so the whole Dr Teeth thing is a bit of an education!) Now if only I could remember what Jamie was trying to illustrate with his mention of Dr Teeth... I think it was something to do with mouth position (amazingly enough).

We had an extended warmup tonight, because when we arrived the orchestra hadn't quite finished recording something else. I thought people would grumble about this, since lots of people had had to really rush to get there by 6.15, but in fact the situation seemed to be accepted quite readily. (Mind you, this was helped by the fact that we were promised an early finish!) The Dr Teeth thing was part of the warmup. So was Jamie's attempt to get us to do the lower register "vvvvv" exercise - "as if you're trying to sculpt concrete with your mouth"... Oh, and I was delighted because we did my all-time favourite warmup - the one where we just sing chords. When I was at school I always loved it when Mike Brewer conducted the choir, because he invariably did that one. (It's more an aural exercise than a warm-up, but it's good to do because lots of people find it really difficult - must mean it's good for them!) Today, because we started in F minor (main key of The Music Makers) and hummed not-too-unrelated chords, it had the nice side-effect of sounding rather like the music from the "Fellowship of the Ring" film just after Gandalf died :-)

We didn't go into the hall till 7.30, but we were hopeful that the last 9 pages wouldn't take long to do, as we'd just rehearsed them very thoroughly. (The previous 4 pages didn't involve us, so they planned to do those after we'd gone.) One thing that I love about working at such a high level is the precision of the instructions. It's kind of a compliment to be considered capable, as a group, of following instructions from Jamie such as "we need about 7% more sound from the altos and basses on the bottom B, and about 10% more from the 2nd basses on the bottom E on the next page". Or, from Mark, "This should be happy. Not sad. Maybe a little wistful, but that's as far as we go."

The extended warmup and rehearsal paid off, as we finished at about 8.15 instead of the scheduled 9.30. And now we have an unusually long time before we meet again - no rehearsal next week, so the next time is on Wednesday 6th April for an intensive session on Cavalleria Rusticana (the concert is only 8 days later!) One final thing though: Thanks to Graham, here is a Manchester Evening News review of last week's concert (it didn't appear online for some reason, so Graham scanned it). Disappointing that there were no reviews in the national papers. Oh well, their loss.

"So where do they breathe, Jamie?" "NEVAH!"

Not much to report from tonight. It was Liz's birthday, though, so I had several rather nice flapjacks in the break. (I also belatedly remembered I had my camera with me - the few pictures I took are on the choir website.) (For those who don't know Liz, she's the one with Gill in the first photo). It was also Andrew the recording guy's birthday - he told us that he doubted we could possibly produce a more atonal version of "Happy Birthday" than the one the orchestra had played earlier... sadly we didn't get a chance to try! It was Andrew who came out with my second favourite quote of the night: "Can it be very sotto voce? I mean very. I mean... VERY."

Recording went quite well. Couple of patches from last night, then we got almost to the end. Just the last 13 pages to do tomorrow night. I'm pleased to report that the basses FINALLY found their A natural in the last bar of page 58. Jamie pointed out to them on Thursday, when one of them asked for help, that they merely had to repeat the exact phrase that the basses of the orchestra had just played TWICE (quite how none of them had noticed that before is beyond me, but they are basses :p (sorry Graham!)) (I suppose I should confess at this point that last night Mark said there was a place where everyone in the choir was coming in late except for one bass. I'd forgotten it amid the thousands of times he's said the altos are the only ones doing stuff right :p ) Anyway, they were still getting the A natural wrong tonight, but after a few goes it was finally fixed.

The "sotto voce" quote above reminds me that I was asked tonight why I hadn't written about the recording session I helped out at on Saturday (the choir involved is called Sotto Voce). The answer is that I didn't have anything particularly interesting to say about it! (so what's new there, I hear you shout :p ) Anyway, there's a report (and photos) on their website.

One final thing. Maggie told me this morning that the tongue should never be higher than the top of the bottom teeth when singing any vowel. Turns out I quite often have it in the middle of my mouth, which blocks the sound! Is this yet another thing that everyone knew except me?

"That was absolutely fantastic... but..."

(that's the favourite saying of Andrew, our recording engineer!)

While we're on favourites, Mark mentioned in passing tonight that the orchestra's two favourite bars of The Music Makers are apparently "world losers and world forsakers"... which are a cappella! Not quite sure what to make of that!

Anyway, the first night of recording went fairly well. Finished exactly on the stroke of 9.30 (someone asked me last week if there was any chance of any of the sessions finishing early - I laughed at her :p ) and by then we'd got halfway through, just up to the bit where the soloist sings for the first time. (She wasn't there tonight, so they can't have planned to get any further.) I figure tomorrow night will be the second half and Thursday will be lots of patching. Disappointingly there wasn't as much time for reading as there usually is in recording sessions - we sang most of the time. Maybe tomorrow (not that I don't like singing, it's just that I have a lot of stuff I need to read this week) :-)

Incidentally, the place where we stopped tonight (figure 48) is what I've labelled in my score as the "Christmas bit". It sounds incredibly Christmassy to me - now if only I could work out what it is that it reminds me of exactly!

Mark told us when we arrived, btw, that he was very pleased with Thursday's gig; "I thought you covered yourselves in glory, and many other things besides!"

Oh, and two different choir people asked me today what a blog is. Short version: it's not an acronym, it's short for "web log" and is basically an online diary. Skip the rest of this post if that is a full enough answer to the question for you!

Longer version: Some blogs (like this one) just ramble on about stuff, in the same way as a normal diary; others (like Blog of a Bookslut) are mainly collections of links to interesting stuff their owners have found on the web. Many blogs have a theme and are hence useful for keeping up with news in that area (e.g. The Leaky Cauldron is a blog about Harry Potter, and has so many contributors that you can guarantee that if there is some Harry Potter news, they will have it in minutes. Saves time looking elsewhere!) There are 3 main useful features of blogs: 1. Anyone in the world can read them (unless they are password protected) so they're a good way of communicating with lots of people; 2. The comments feature enables interactivity; 3. The fact that it's easy to include website links means that instead of describing everything in detail, you can direct people to other websites that have all the information already there.

If you want to know more, see here or here or here. Or the extremely comprehensive Guardian report on blogs. Or better still, try reading a few. I can recommend any of the ones listed down the right hand side of this page. Brief summary follows:

James and the Blue Cat - written by one of the writers of "Green Wing", but otherwise just general stuff; makes me laugh!
Neil Gaiman - by a fairly famous author (this is one of the longest-established blogs on the web)
Blog of a Bookslut - news from the literary world
The Leaky Cauldron - Harry Potter news
Random Acts of Reality - written by a paramedic
The Policeman's Blog - what it says on the tin
Making Light - written by a US book publisher; mainly general stuff though
Beyond Northern Iraq - written by a BBC reporter who lost a leg while covering the Iraq war
Fluxblog - an MP3 blog (has songs available for download, changed most days)
Baghdad Burning - written by an Iraqi woman living in Baghdad
The Alien Online - written by an ex-bookseller, mostly about science fiction (books, TV, films etc.)
The Woolamaloo Gazette - written by a bookseller, but mostly general stuff; Joe is, however, famous in the blogging world because he was fired by Waterstones as a result of (fairly harmless) comments he posted on his blog

Well, that was a longer post than intended; now I need to sleep. And guess what - still no essay done! Shame on me :-)

A scene of endless sin and pleasure, eh? Looking forward to seeing the music for THAT!

I'm supposed to be writing an essay that's now two weeks late, so of course I'm procrastinating. Decided I needed to blog as there are at least 3 things from Thursday's gig I realised I forgot to mention. But first... I just updated the forthcoming concerts page. And I don't know why it never occurred to me before (another CRAFT moment, probably!) but I've now added links to the official Hallé pages for those concerts. That means that not only can people easily see who the soloists are and what else is on the programme, but they can buy tickets online! Honestly, the Hallé should pay me commission :p

Discovered, while looking up said links, that the Wagner concert may be more interesting than I'd expected. I'm not a Wagner fan generally - I may have just been unlucky with what I've sung, but I've found all the Wagner I've sung so far to be extremely boring (plus, it seems to give me a sore throat!) Well, in May the ladies are singing part of Tannhäuser. We haven't been told which part - but according to the Hallé page, the only bits they're doing are "Tannhäuser's glorious Overture and the Venusberg, a scene of endless sin and pleasure". And since generally the chorus doesn't sing in overtures... 

Another web-related point of interest: I discovered that if you google "2nd altos", this blog is now the top result! (It's only in 2nd place if you miss the quotes out, but since it was 3rd last week, I imagine there may be yet another change...) Oh, and in case anyone's wondered where the title came from, it was the name of our CHAMPION 2nd alto quiz team (Gill, Chris, Liz, Alison and me) from the choir Christmas social. (We very kindly allowed Alison to join us, even though she's just been banished to 1st alto, since she sang 2nd for so many years :-) Which reminds me: I heard, quite some time later, that apparently one of the other teams - the one with lots of tenors, I believe - complained that we cheated! The cheek! Well, there were several teams I saw cheating, but I can promise you we weren't one of them. We didn't need to :p

Anyway, before I forget AGAIN, four things left over from Thursday night. (Yes, I just thought of another one!) Firstly, those of you who like the Jamieisms may have been disappointed that I didn't include any. So here are three: 1. Much giggling (mainly from the altos, I admit) at the poor guy trying to get page 30 perfect - the lyrics there are "or one that is coming to birth". Well, he discussed "the depth of tone on your come" and advised us to "get quicker to the birth and enjoy it". I suppose "you need a lot more tone on the bottom" is harmless in itself, but by that stage everything was funny :p

2. While warming up, doing the rolling-the-shoulder exercise: "Rolling, rolling, rolling. Keep them shoulders rolling. Keep them shoulders rolling, Rahh-ahh-ahh-ahh Hide, I think you'll find the vowel is!"

3. Still while warming up, but I forget the context: "More blood on the floor! You know, that sort of thing! Tap the sweat from it at the end of the performance! The Cream of Manchester!" (I was reminded of this one while watching a Friends episode yesterday, in which they mentioned Boddingtons beer. Amazing.)

And finally, one great bit from the concert itself that I forgot to mention was how fantastic it feels when the orchestra applaud us. They applaud everyone who performs with them, of course - it's be rude not to - but often when we sing with them they turn and smile at us too, and on Thursday night I swear a couple of them cheered! Great feeling :-)

Tonight is the first of three long recording sessions for The Music Makers. Top tip to people who haven't done a recording session before: BRING A BOOK :p

McFly, you fools!

Sir Ian McKellen came to our concert tonight!

Sadly I didn't find this out till after it was over, so I didn't actually see him. Although it's probably just as well, because I'd have been totally distracted and spent the whole concert scanning the audience :p

(On my way to the station after the concert, I was busy texting everyone I know to tell them this news. My friend Nigel responded by saying it was a pity Sir Ian didn't come to one of the pop concerts I do at school with my band, as then he could've called out "McFly, you fools!" ... If this makes no sense to you, sorry - it requires far more explanation than I have time to give, but it amused me a great deal :-)

Right, better get this finished, as I've just noticed that 63 people looked at this blog in the past week, 4 of them in the last few hours... I did start it on Thursday night but sleep and work have prevented me finishing till now (Saturday lunchtime), and I need to leave the house in 10 minutes for another helping-out-a-friend's-choir favour. Must stop saying yes to those, I have too much work to do!

Anyway. The concert was pretty good in the end. Not perfect - at one point the 1st altos behind me were a bar ahead, for example, but luckily we 2nds were watching Mark and stuck to our guns! - but a good deal better than Wednesday night. We'd watched the first half from the gallery of the auditorium - unusual, this, we normally sit in the choir seats even when not singing, but apparently Mark had decided it was important to do it this way on this occasion. (Not sure why!) Highlights of the first half for me were Sospiri (one of my mum's favourite pieces, but I hadn't heard it before; sounded more like Vaughan Williams than Elgar) and Elgar's orchestration of a Bach Fantasia and Fugue. The fugue was so OTT it was fabulous - I can imagine Elgar sitting there chuckling to himself while writing it, and I'm sure Bach would have smiled wryly! It had piccolo flourishes, trombone waggly bits, harp glissandi and cymbal crashes, and so much more. I recommend it!

Mark made one of his speeches before The Music Makers, which I'm sure the audience appreciated. Then the alto soloist came on (in the one of the least flattering dresses I've ever seen, I have to say, but it was OK because she sang beautifully) and we were under way. It was an exhilarating sing, and I'm looking forward to recording the work next week. (As ever, I think it'd be better if we recorded it *before* performing it, because the performance would be much better IMHO, but never mind!) I asked Wendy, whose first concert it was, how she found it, and she said she'd been terrified when about to sing the first line, but as soon as she started to sing she loved it :-)

I forgot to mention that we had a "warm-up" an hour before the concert - I use inverted commas because we didn't actually sing, just wrote lots of last minute instructions. And I was astonished - and quite disgusted - to see that at least one person didn't appear to write a single one of them in her score. In fact, I didn't think she had a pencil, and after half an hour of us writing and her not writing, I was about to pointedly offer to lend her one, when she produced one; but since she'd been reading her programme rather than listening, she didn't know where she was supposed to be writing the latest instruction, so gave up and went back to reading her programme. As I said before, I am very jealous of these people who can presumably remember hundreds of instructions without writing any of them down, but I have to say that I feel very nervous when singing with them, as I know that at any moment their memory might fail them and they might spoil the performance for everyone else by turning a page when we've been told to keep still, etc. Oh well.

"Tenors: At the moment your Ming, without meaning to offend, sticks out rather."

(That was my favourite comment of the warmup. It narrowly beat "Basses, your E natural needs some northerly attention.")

Just a short report tonight, as I must sleep (and NOT get sidetracked by World of Warcraft, but that's another story!) Orchestral rehearsal for the Elgar tonight. Always exciting to sing with an orchestra, particularly when it's one of the best orchestras in the world. So orchestral rehearsals are eagerly anticipated by most members of the choir. Unfortunately tonight's wasn't one of the best. We sang right through the piece at the start, and none of it was very good - it just wasn't together. The tuning was fine, and there were no problems with notes, but it was just messy. And the problem is that a lot of people tend to respond to this by concentrating extra hard, except that their version of "concentrating harder" is to stare more at their score... which is of course exactly the WRONG strategy! When we went through stuff the second time, it worked much better because people were watching Mark more. But the first time shocked people, I think - we all knew it wasn't going at all well. When I thought about it later, I realised that actually it wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things - it never actually fell apart, it was just untidy. But we've done so much work on it that we know it ought to be much better than it was that first time.

The concert will be great though, I think. It's a fascinating-looking programme, and Jane Irwin has a fantastic voice. (Maggie sang the solos last night, and that was also fantastic, although their voices are quite different.) My favourite bit, by far, is the bit at figure 76 that Mark explained was the Windflower bit:

it must ever be
that we dwell
in our dreaming
and our singing
a little apart...

I can't actually sing the Eb major bar without my voice wobbling. People who've sat next to me will know that I tend to write "GB" in my score at such places, to warn me that this might happen. ("GB" = "Good Bit" :p ) Apart from that, though, my breathing - which has always been by far my weakest point of singing - wasn't too bad at all tonight. This was a nice surprise, and I have various theories that might explain it, but I need to see if I can repeat it tomorrow before I analyse too much!

Ooh, my other favourite bit is a bit I never noticed at all before tonight. At one loud point early on (figure 19, "we fashion an empire's glory") the trumpets actually blast out La Marseillaise while we're singing! If they do that on the recording I've got, they must certainly do it extremely quietly - no blaring involved - because I've never noticed it. Must listen again to check. (It took us totally by surprise - Mark got them to play it on their own, and when they played the French national anthem we presumed they were kidding - but they weren't!)

"Did he say THONG?!?"

("he" being Mark Elder. And the answer was "yes", and it was very amusing at the time, but I can't remember now what the context was!)

Music Makers piano rehearsal tonight. I don't think there are any non-choir people reading this, but in case there are, I'd better explain what a piano rehearsal is. Slightly confusing term, because we do of course rehearse with a piano 95% of the time! You see, when we perform with the orchestra, the concert is conducted by a top internationally renowned conductor (usually - but not always - Mark Elder, who's the Hallé Music Director and Principal Conductor). But we don't rehearse with the conductor until we already know the music really well; our normal weekly rehearsals are with Jamie, who's the Hallé Choral Director. (He does conduct a few concerts himself, but mainly his job is to prepare the choir for concerts.) When the concert is imminent, we rehearse with the orchestra (obviously), conducted by the conductor of the concert; there are only one or two of these "orchestral rehearsals". (Of course it'd be lovely to rehearse with the orchestra the whole time, but it'd be unbelievably expensive!) And in order to save time (and hence expense) with the orchestra, there is usually a "piano rehearsal" just before the first orchestral rehearsal. This is a rehearsal at which the conductor of the concert comes to rehearse with the choir, but not the orchestra (hence "piano rehearsal"). It's an opportunity for the conductor to clarify speeds and other details, and to listen to the choir without having to worry about the orchestra. (The piano in question is played by our regular accompanist, the extremely amazingly wonderful David Jones - he's SO good that on the rare occasions that he makes an audible mistake, a shocked ripple runs through the choir...)

Anyway, that's what a piano rehearsal is. So tonight Mark came to see us - tomorrow night is the orchestral rehearsal (only one this time) and Thursday night is the concert. As always with Mark, it was an inspirational evening and everyone left grinning. He had some very nice things to say about the Tippett gig (in particular, he said that in the Spirituals he could understand every word - high praise indeed!) Many laugh-out-loud moments, but Jamie had us giggling before Mark even turned up - he made us practise facial expressions (for example, "your 'crotchet = 152 der duh-duh der duh-duh der And Therefore Today' face") and then consolidated the amusement by extending his evil KitKat warmup exercise to "kitty katty kitty katty". (Could've been worse, at least he didn't insist on Lavender Leather...)

Ooh, I just remembered. You remember the cute tenor soloist with the beanie? Well, I thought I saw him when I got to the rehearsal tonight, but I assumed I'd imagined it. But I hadn't, because he (and the bass soloist) are singing with us for this project (gig and recording) due to our numbers of men being rather low. I'd tell you what Sylvia said about the bass guy, who was sitting in front of her, but she'd only be embarrassed :p

Tonight also featured a 20 year service badge presentation - whenever someone's "time is due", the tradition is that Mark presents them with a special pin that they wear on their choir outfit. This time it was Jean's turn, and Mark (as usual) said all the right things, and (as she sat down again) said "Now... what would you like to sing for us?" I'm told that while the rest of the choir was laughing at this, Jean called to him "This!" So everyone was happy :-)

Falling asleep now, so I'll just list the Markisms I scribbled down in the back of my score. (As an aside... I have so many things written on my actual music - not amusing comments, but actual instructions - that in some places I'm now having to write new instructions in the margin and draw my attention to them with arrows. So I'm INCREDIBLY impressed that there seem to be quite a few people in the choir who can apparently remember all these instructions WITHOUT WRITING ANY OF THEM DOWN. Wish *I* had a memory as good as theirs! And amazingly it seems to be the ones who don't make it to all the rehearsals who have THE BEST MEMORIES OF ALL. Funny, that.)

• Mark's story about performing Mahler 6 on a Saturday night in Brighton, in which during his intro he mentioned how long it lasted, and a man gasped "I've got a bus to catch!"

• Mark: "We've all got to agree on how short the king is!"

• Mark: "I'd even breathe, everybody." Choir: "Hurray!"

• Mark's impression of Elgar in conversation with Jaeger

• The look on Mark's face when he turned round and caught Jamie, who was sitting behind him, doing an escalator impression to the men (non-choir people: this is to remind them to think downwards when singing upwards)

• Mark: "I saw Janet Baker do that once. I'll never forget it. 11 o'clock in the morning, in Edinburgh. No, sorry, 11.30." (He was referring to her bending her knees when singing a high note.)

• Jamie and Mark doing a knee-bend duet is the image I can't get out of my mind :p

Benedicite

Quite often, I am asked to help out other choirs by joining them for concerts. (The invitations generally come via fellow Hallé Choir members.) Today was such a day, and it really reinforced something I already knew but tend to forget, which is how fortunate we are to be able to sing with singers who are generally in tune, an orchestra whose players can all actually play in tune, and above all, conductors who can conduct well. It's incredibly frustrating, when this is what I'm used to, to experience "how the other half lives". (Although, in some ways it's actually kind of nice, because I do feel useful being able to help.)

The concert today was at a big independent boarding school in the middle of the countryside, and the choir consisted of a mixture of schoolchildren, staff, parents, local people and "associate singers" such as myself. Not sure about the orchestra but it looked a similar make-up. The soloists were schoolchildren (well, one of them was an RNCM student, but I think I heard someone say that she was an ex-pupil of the school). The conductor was a teacher at the school, I think, and I'm afraid I didn't think much of him. People who know little about music occasionally say to me that they can't see why a conductor is necessary - surely the musicians will stay together if they just count properly? Tonight's concert showed why a conductor is needed, because many of the things that went wrong could plainly have been avoided if we'd had a better one. The main problems were that (a) he wasn't consistent (e.g. movements that he'd done in 4 in the rehearsal were in 2 in the concert) and, more seriously, (b) his beat was insecure - if the violins went slower, he followed them; he hesitated before downbeats, which consequently got later and later; that sort of thing.

The Vivaldi Gloria was a safe enough programming choice; it worked well enough in rehearsal, although the two girls who sang the "Laudamus Te" duet didn't seem to know it very well, and one of them ran out in tears after a fairly disastrous attempt at it. (Oh, and I found out that the Ricordi edition - which I have - is quite different from the OUP edition - which everyone else had - in many places! Helpful!) And it worked fine in the performance, despite the conductor trying to bring the choir in a beat early for their first entry. But it was a reasonable choice for the group to attempt. The other work on the programme - Andrew Carter's "Benedicite" - really wasn't, in my opinion.

It's a pity it didn't work, because it's a piece I didn't know at all, and I really enjoyed discovering it. (In particular, I loved having some proper sight reading to do!) It has interesting harmonies, foot-tapping rhythms, and good tunes. And it's not actually that hard, despite offputting details (for example, the opening time signature being 2+2+2+3 over 8). But it needs a confident choir, which in turn needs a confident conductor. Tonight it had neither. And I can't help blaming the conductor; the choir actually knew it pretty well, but were not confident in their leads, and they needed support that they just didn't get.

Despite this, I did actually enjoy the day, although I do have a bit of a sore throat from singing tenor very loudly to help the guys in front :p

Hurrah for Tom

Bit of an unusual rehearsal tonight. You remember we were on Radio 3 yesterday? (You can still listen to it online if you missed it... I missed it myself due to football being on, much good that it did me to watch that! Only trouble with the "listen again" thing is that I can't see an obvious way of fast forwarding to our bit, which is right near the end. Maybe I'll try tomorrow.) Well, as predicted, the Spirituals weren't broadcast. But we were right when we thought the BBC recorded them anyway, because tonight Jamie informed us that they had left the tape running "as a favour", and he thought it'd be useful to us to hear it. This was made possible by the lovely Tom, who's a fantastic tenor in addition to being lovely, but in this case the relevant piece of info about him is that he works as some sort of sound engineer type person at the BBC. Tonight he brought along a load of decent audio equipment so that we could hear the recording from the gig. It was very interesting, as was the discussion afterwards.

Personally I was struck by (in no particular order):

1. the splashiness of the s sounds (I thought they could have been much tidier);

2. the wonderful effect of certain things I remember Jamie working on (e.g. the men's "tremble" in "Nobody Knows");

3. the fact that when the whole choir was singing the men sounded much fewer in number than the ladies (which they are, but it's not usually so apparent; I'm usually surprised to discover that the altos can hardly be heard on recordings despite our numbers, but on this occasion we were easily drowning the men);

4. the fact that individual voices could occasionally be discerned (I'm pretty sure I heard myself in a couple of places, which is not good)

5. the loud breaths (I'm particularly bad at this);

and of course

6. the famous BFBABTEIGW... I cringed at the start of "By and By" when I heard it clearly being sung incorrectly, but it got gradually better until by the end it sounded more or less right \o/

The rest of the rehearsal was pretty fast-moving. We did quite a few short excerpts of the Elgar, and it felt quite different because Jamie got us to sit mixed up rather than in sections (I think this was inspired by Gillian's comment that the four sections didn't sound entirely together rhythmically on the recording). Always entertaining! I sat between two 2nd sops (Lizzy and Renate), which was nice, as I can't always hear the 2nd sops at all, never mind louder than the 1sts!

Finished off with 15 minutes skimming through the Mascagni, since it'll be ages since we have a chance to do it again, and then the performance will be nearly upon us! Gill was recording bits of this (she does this often when she wants to go away and learn the notes); I was a little alarmed to realise she'd recorded me doing the screechy bit where we sing the sop part, and made her promise never to play it back to me :p

Anyway, next week is an intense Elgar week: piano rehearsal with Mark on Tuesday, orchestral rehearsal Wednesday, gig on Thursday. Very much looking forward to all three occasions. (Wish I could persuade anyone I know to go to the gig but it's unlikely - my mum's usually the only good bet, and she's away. Pity - it's never quite the same if there's no-one you know in the audience.)

Ooh, I nearly forgot tonight's favourite Jamieism: I think it was when he explaining how he wanted the "c" in "music makers" to be produced. "Throw it forward", he said. "As if you're ten-pin bowling. No, actually, it's more like boules."

"If someone has to move their tongue, so be it!"

... said Jamie tonight, when trying to get the altos to all produce the same vowel sound on the "ma-" of "music makers". Ten minutes later, when he'd managed to not only do that but also get the tenors, basses and finally the sopranos to copy it, he was delighted with the result. I think it was at that point that he grinned widely and said "it's like having a new toy to play with!" Then he pointed out "That's ONE NOTE." Our planned perfect recording could be a while away at this rate :p

No more Tippett - just Elgar and Mascagni tonight (with a seating change in between the two because the ladies and the gentlemen are both divided into three equal parts for most of the Mascagni, so seating the sops and altos separately doesn't really make sense). Oh, and we sang Happy Birthday to Naomi :-) We finally did the end bit of The Music Makers, which I was pleased about because I'd only done it once, the first day we sight read it (the one rehearsal I missed, to go and see United, was the one when they did lots of work on that bit). Most of the time on the Mascagni was spent clarifying who's singing which part and when, but we did have a quick go at the bit from "a casa" to the end, mainly concentrating on the Italian. Much hilarity when everyone realised what "la giostra" sounds like if you pronounce it correctly... not helped by a tenor muttering something about "thinking outside the box" :p

We finished by singing once through the end of the Easter Hymn, but not before Jamie had said some lovely things about Saturday's gig. There are also some good reviews - 5 stars from both the Times and the Guardian, although the latter didn't actually mention the choir! The Manchester Evening News only gave 3 stars, but gets brownie points for being the only one to mention the Spirituals (which I think they liked!) Pity it looks as though the radio broadcast won't include them, according to the new Radio Times at least. Hopefully the BBC will keep them in reserve to broadcast another time, because we're pretty sure they did record them - there were mics for the soloists, and they weren't in anything else, you see.

Oh, and tonight's rehearsal was a bit of an eventful one for me for non-singing reasons; I'd been volunteered, along with Ken, to report back to the choir on a recent meeting the committee had with some Hallé management types. First time I'd spoken to the whole choir, as far as I can remember. It seemed to go fairly well, and lots of people came up to me afterwards to congratulate me for explaining things clearly, which was nice of them - it seems that there is some other use for skills learned teaching in a special school :-)