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.