"Ever a bell tolls... for DEATH!"

Firstly, two links I've been meaning to post: another Cav review (found by Graham) and the Badger Badger website. The latter is the one featured on the T shirt I wore a week or two ago, which several people asked me about. (WARNING: If you are supposed to be working, you may want to mute your sound before clicking on the badger link...)

Not much to say tonight because I am snowed under with work. [EDIT: I seem to have rabbitted on for ages regardless! Oh well.] Jamie was back, and he started with the Chorus of the Scottish Refugees. Not the most exciting chorus ever - Jamie's translation of one of our repeated lines was more entertaining that any of the actual lines! (That's the line in the title, btw.) We altos did rather hope we might get to go home early since we apparently didn't have a part to sing - we pretended we hadn't seen the "3rd soprano" part that went down to bottom A :p

We also sight read the Venusberg thingy while the men had an early tea break. We were delighted to learn that we will be offstage, so it should be a short night. I'd be worried if I were Jamie and Naomi though, because there were quite a few people I heard say that they certainly weren't going to waste an evening to sing 23 bars. I hope we actually have a choir!

Talking of people muttering, there was a lot of that at the break, when one of the sopranos - don't know her name, I think she's fairly new - sat down at the piano and proceeded to accompany herself in some aria or other. I guess there's no reason why she shouldn't, strictly, but the fact remains that people generally don't do that, so there was lots of muttering, along the lines of "Well, it's just not really appropriate, is it?" and "Who does she think she is?" (It wasn't that she was singing badly - it was just very unexpected!)

Anyway. Jamie told us that he'd spoken to Mark today, who'd been listening to our Elgar recording and was delighted to report that it's all perfectly in tune. "It's much better if choirs sing in tune!" is his advice. This was kind of a theme of the night - Jamie later said, after we'd sung a bit of the Gerontius demons' chorus, "to get the effect, it should kind of be in tune, shouldn't it?" (Oh, and could someone please explain to me why it irritates me quite so intensely when I hear people calling it Jerontius? As was pointed out to me once, it doesn't actually matter, because the word is never actually sung anywhere in the piece... but every time I hear someone pronounce it with a soft G, I have to restrain myself from yelling "Gerontius!" at them!)

Not many Jamieisms tonight, but I think my favourite was "if you're in any doubt over how far to go, it's a semitone higher" (re: the sopranos' first high "ha! ha!" on page 85, which apparently no choir ever gets right. But our sops did, tonight!) Most amusing moment of the night, though, was the looks on the guys' faces when they were trying to pronounce the "th" of "earth" (on page 70) to Jamie's satisfaction. Some of the 2nd tenors looked as if they were blowing raspberries. And knowing them, they probably were :-)

But wait - I nearly forgot! That wasn't the funniest thing. The funniest thing was when the rhythm in the Scottish chorus wasn't accurate enough. Jamie said that the long notes were fine, it was the occasional semiquavers that were all over the place. So he made us sing it several times, singing nothing BUT the semiquavers. You probably had to be there to appreciate how funny this was!