Have you ever seen a giraffe who's NOT content?

Well, the guy from The Guardian doesn't mention the choir again, but he seems to have liked the concert. You could infer from his review that he thought we sang ecstatically and gloriously, but only if you read it very carefully (and desperately!) I see it's a different guy from last week, so it's not even as if it's just one of them who's blind...

Sorry to not blog till now, after Thursday night. I had house guests who arrived later that night. (I cursed them all day, because the last thing I wanted to do when I got back from the concert was to tidy and clean the house and make up 4 beds, but by the time I'd done it I realised that the bonus was that my house was tidy for the first time in weeks, so that automatically put me in a better mood, plus it was lovely to see Ruth, who's one of my oldest friends.) Then I had to go straight from work yesterday to a hotel in Gisburn, for our school's annual staff residential training and team-building course. Got home just in time to see United beat Portsmouth, and I'm going to bed in a minute. First chance to catch up on sleep in about 3 weeks \o/

Shostakovich 3 went well. Liz L says that Petroc mentioned the sashes! He did come over and speak to Dr Liz and me, but that was just to ask whether the RNCM chorus was present. (I'd like to think that he asked us because we were clearly the most knowledgeable people there, but in fact it was probably be we were sitting closest to him :p ) The fabulous trumpet bit at the end was as fabulous as ever, but the early part of the symphony (which we hadn't heard till the performance) had some good bits too. Our bit was the best though. Including the page which I belatedly realised reminded me of Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi. No, NOT the bit where she's in the gold bikini. Before that, the first time she appears in the film, she's disguised as a bounty hunter and talks in some strange language. Well, the Russian on one particular page in the middle of Shost 3 sounds exactly like that speech.

No, I don't know which page, I've handed my music in.

Yes, I do realise how sad it is that I noticed the similarity :p

Some good Jamieisms during the warmup. The title of this post comes from the end of one of them, a real classic, which he called out while we were doing a repeated exercise: "Imagine you're a rhinoceros, with a really big horn... An elephant, with a trunk!... A duck-billed platypus, with a, erm, double bill!... An angry gorilla!... A cheeky monkey!... A content giraffe!... What am I saying?!? Have you ever seen a giraffe who's NOT content?"

Also we got "Sopranos, you could really help here by not being asleep." But my favourite moment was when we were doing the quiet "laughing arpeggio" exercise. Jamie's piano accompaniment to this became more and more funky and impressive, in a Jools Holland-ish way. I became convinced that he was prolonging the exercise mainly so he could show off his boogie-woogie skillz :p