ROTH!

Orchestral rehearsal for Gerontius tonight. Went pretty well. The London Philharmonic Choir got a huge round of applause for managing to get here from London today, and they sounded good. (I believe there will be more of them in the Albert Hall, not all of them could get time off work to come up to Manchester.) The soloists are all FABULOUS: Alice Coote as the Angel, Paul Groves as Gerontius, and Matthew Best as the Priest and the Angel of the Agony. The Hallé Youth Choir sounded great. The orchestra sounded great. (Although, to be fair, they always do!)

Not really much else to say about tonight. Oh, except that I spotted a Markism from last night that I forgot to mention - he was trying to get us to sound more mocking during the Demons' Chorus, and suggested thinking during the "What's a saint?" line on page 84: "Those dreadful sandals!"

Tonight's main funny moment surrounded the pronunciation (by the Youth Choir) of the word "wrath" on page 36. There was a bit of confusion among them and Mark couldn't understand the word. So he got each section of the main choir to say it. Everyone agreed it was "ROTH!" but the Youth Choir were going more along the lines of "RATH!" except with a dark A... Jamie seemed pretty pleased when they all agreed on their pronunciation, particularly since it was different to everyone else's. But Mark preferred the usual sound, so they had to give in :p

Unrelated PS: You know, ever since I first heard Gerontius I've meant to write a song which includes the Earth chord sequence (i.e. the one that comes for the first time when the Priest comes in on page 39). Maybe this summer I'll actually get round to it! (For anyone who wants to play it, the chords are: Bb, Gm6, Dm/A, F/A; Ab, Fm6, Cm/G, Eb/G; Gb, Ebm6, E dim, A7/E, A7; D. Ooooh :-)