"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.