You knew I meant "I Was Glad", right?

... when I said Zadok? For some reason those two works always merge together in my head. Tonight I arrived at the rehearsal, mentioned to someone that I was looking forward to doing Zadok, wasn't in the least fazed when this person had no recollection that we were doing it, and then didn't bat an eyelid when Naomi handed me a copy of I Was Glad. I even sat with the copy on my knee and talked about it being Zadok.... I worry about my mind sometimes :p

So we sang I Was Glad. Which was great. Not Zadok, but just as good. Bit more of The Bells - did the funeral bells bit (which wasn't quite as hard as the alarm bells) and then revisited the alarm bells. ("It's amazing how this has stuck!" commented Jamie after tonight's first attempt at it... he claimed he could hear correct stuff! We'd just done our "Loud and Wrong" thing again - don't know if any of the other sections were more successful, since we couldn't hear them most of the time :p )

We had the lovely Jonathan accompanying us tonight, by the way. We'd love to know whether or not he was sight reading The Bells. If he was, it was extremely impressive!

And then the first half of Belshazzar, in the second half. So we've now sung all of it (well, except the "Slain!" page). Should be exciting on Sunday... Oh, and someone mentioned my list of Gerontius scribblings, so I thought I might post the (much shorter) list of random stuff I've got scribbled in my Belshazzar score.

p1: bar 5, Isaiah - I don't think I've ever heard this chord convincingly correct. The outer parts always seem to end up an octave apart.

p7: bars 1 and 5 - it's not just the men; a large number of the altos always sing the bottom note of these octave leaps wrong (they end up on the same note as the sops).

p17: bar 3, 1st altos - most people sang a Bb instead of a C here, last time.

p19: bar 5, 1st altos again (sorry, this is the last one) - this always makes me cringe because the two alto parts are supposed to be an octave apart, yet the 1sts always sound really flat to me at this point. So do several of the other parts, to be fair - I have arrows pointing upwards all over the page - I just notice the 1sts more because of the octave.

p40: figure 28, I have written (and I think this is a Kent Nagano instruction - it's definitely a single instruction rather than a composite from several performances, anyway): "Bright, enthusiastic, well-accented, short, lots of text, interesting... silvery."

p42: anvil on beat 2 of 1st bar; one of the offstage brass bands plays for the first time at the end of bar 2.

p43: whip on bottom line

p45: bottom line, R band in first 2 bars, followed by L band in next 2 bars

p47: For some reason I find it impossible to come in at the bottom of the page if I listen to what the orchestra is playing. The only way I can do it is if I tap the beat with my finger and ignore all else. Weird, I don't usually have to do that.

p73: Oddly enough, on this page I have written "DON'T follow trumpets!"

p85-97: Really hard to feel the time signature here, unless you write in the "big bars" and number the smaller bars as 4 beats. (If you don't know what I mean, ask me to show you my score. Or, look at the top of page 86, where it starts the numbering for you. The "big barlines" go after each 4th bar.)

p95: penultimate bar, choir 1 has a different rhythm to choir 2, but I don't think I've ever heard it sung as written.

p96: Top line = Grandstand bit!

p100: Alto part (start of bottom line) = Muppets Swedish chef bit :p

p111 (fig 74) - p116: Another "big bars" bit like before (they start the numbering for you)

p120: (last line of piece) I have no idea what quasi senza rit. means, despite knowing the meaning of the individual words...