"I worry that, when it says ppp, you lose your choral mojo."

I have to say that I worry about that too. I was quite frustrated tonight. We did Gerontius - almost all of it - for the first time in a while due to the operatic interruption - and unfortunately there are a lot of people in the choir who seem to feel that because they have sung Gerontius many times and know how it goes, they don't actually need to watch the conductor, pay too much attention to the dynamics, or in fact make an awful lot of effort at all. Jamie was very conscious of this, I think, and kept accusing people of "singing along" (with good reason!). But the two main problems are (IMHO): every time the music gets quieter, the choir gets slower and flatter (but not actually very much quieter); and every time the music speeds up a bit, the choir, in general, doesn't.

My frustration wasn't helped by a few of the 1st altos who talked almost the whole way through the rehearsal. There are a couple of them who always do this, but I can't usually hear what they're saying, just the general sound of chat (not that that's not irritating when I'm trying to concentrate!) But tonight all the 2nd altos had been seated in front of the 1sts, presumably because we are so much fewer in number, but it meant that the chatterers were just too loud to ignore, although I wasn't quite close enough to turn round and speak to them unobtrusively.

I'll be in a better mood next week, I'm on holiday!

We did have a new 2nd alto tonight, actually, called Lisa. So maybe our quest for world domination is getting back on track :p

Some more Jamieisms from tonight:

"At the moment there are too many fights breaking out, chorally." (this followed a train of thought about thinking rather than running on adrenaline in the fugue, and a comment that if you don't do that, you may as well be on a rugby team, and a realisation that good rugby teams do actually think, and it's the ones who don't who end up fighting...)

"I hope you didn't miss the opportunity to practise it!" (to the sops, about their last "ha! ha!" on page 85 - it wasn't so much what Jamie said here that amused me, as the looks on the sops' faces when he told them that he'd deliberately rehearsed that bar twice without them, to save their voices and enable them to sing along mentally - it looked rather as if most of them had been daydreaming through those few minutes!)

"Say "holiest" suggestively." (Page 108. No comment.)

Oh, and someone asked to be pointed back to my annotated Gerontius post. There you are :-)