"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!)