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."