"Sustain the guy's name - whatever we think of him!"

That's L(y)enin, in case you were wondering... I think possibly the most most amusing moment of tonight was when Jamie said he couldn't remember what the very last word of Shostakovich 2 was. He was somewhat embarrassed when we told him it was L(y)enin :-)

Orchestral rehearsal for Shostakovich 2 tonight. Went quite well. It's much easier with the orchestra - and the siren! Lots of siren-related fun, including it being too loud and often coming in at the wrong place. The highlight, though, was when Rory Macdonald, the Hallé's new Assistant Conductor, who was controlling the siren from a laptop at the back of the hall, managed to broadcast an extremely loud Windows error alert tone through the loudspeakers :p Mark turned round very slowly to glare at him!

We did a new thing tonight, which was that instead of the people sitting on the outside edges of the choir shuffling inwards to join the others when they stood up to sing, we all moved outwards until the whole choir was spread out sufficiently for no-one to be touching each other. This felt pretty good! Made us look - and hence feel - more numerous and confident. Which was the stated aim, so it's just as well :-)

Mark seemed - by the end, at least - fairly happy with our singing. (Although he kept calling the altos "mezzos". Grrr.) The rehearsal finished with the orchestra playing the whole symphony so we could see where we came in. It's not a tuneful piece - we knew that - but I enjoyed it more than I'd expected to. (I don't see myself playing it as relaxing background music any time soon, though!) The highlight for me was the trumpets (this is often the case). There was one bit in particular where there were four totally independent - but equally impressive - trumpet parts. Later on they got to do a fabulous fanfare, but it wasn't as good as the first bit. Oh, and just before we sang, there was a lengthy section which can only be described as the whole orchestra going mad at once. I don't mind a bit of dissonance when there's so much to watch :-)

(We're live on Radio 3 tomorrow night, btw. However, the BBC don't even mention there's a choir in the concert, and neither does the Radio Times. Tsk.)

Incidentally, I am trying to decide which is the most ridiculous Russian word. From symphonies 2 and 3 my personal shortlist is:

• khrabr
• vzmyit
• fploshadee (I was so disappointed when it turned out not to be "sploshadee", as printed... how good a word is that?!?)

Oddly enough, the one word I think we can all say is "ryevalyootseeya". Probably because we can all remember what it's supposed to sound like :-) My favourite Russian word ever, though, remains one from that Prokofiev thing we did (Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, was it called?). It was one of the first words in the piece and was something like "leeshrazhleechnim". I forget what it meant, but I just loved the feeling of saying it :-)

Anyway, enough of the Russian. After the break we'd done all that we needed to do on Shostakovich, so we went elsewhere in the Bridgewater Hall to start work on stuff for the a cappella concert (hint to those who can never remember how to spell that: two words, two Ps, two Ls). It's to be mainly stuff by Vaughan Williams and Tallis (one of which Jamie says is a "fast funky motet which is a bit like a madrigal"), but tonight we just got two of the pieces - Tavener's The Lamb (which many of us had done before) and Tallis's Loquebantur variis linguis ("The apostles spoke in many tongues of the great works of God") (which we hadn't). The latter was very lovely, even at first sight-read. (Jamie was stressing sight-reading methods, and people were doing pretty well tonight. It occurred to me, though, that sometime I must try writing down an explanation of how I sight read, because it's the one thing I'm unnaturally good at - that sounds really arrogant, sorry, but hey - and people often ask me how I do it! I'll try to do that in the next few weeks.)

The tenors were a big focus of the Tallis. There was much amusement at Jamie referring to them as the putty that holds the piece together, but I think it was one of those "you had to be there" moments... There was also Jamie's "Show us your lifebuoy - not show us your life, boys" (referring to them using their stomach muscles). Oh, and today's bits of random music-related trivia:

• where there's a C flat in one part and a C natural in another part in the same bar, that's called a false relation

• tunes like the one in the tenor part of the Tallis are called cantus firmus

• such tunes are usually in the tenor part rather than any of the others, and this is actually the reason why the part got its name - it comes from the Latin for "to hold", because it holds the tune while the other parts add decoration.

There you are, now you blog-readers can impress the people next to you next time we sing the Tallis, by mentioning these things before Jamie does (he hasn't yet...) :-)

A couple of final things. Firstly, I forgot to say yesterday, but Martin brought his son's drawing for us to see. It's extremely impressive. I passed it round the choir - hope it got back to Martin, because I never saw it again!

Secondly, I just noticed tonight that the Hallé official website has some new bits - their archives are now online, including orchestra and choir lists going back a very long time. Go and look!

And finally - if you haven't been in the Green Room at the Bridgewater Hall, or you've been in but weren't paying attention to the walls, go in there the next chance you get. There are loads of signed photos on the wall from visiting performers. I was very amused by the Eddie Izzard one, but the Simon Rattle one is good too :-)

EDIT: Can't sleep - again - so am faffing online. Just saw this article in the Guardian, featuring interviews with stressed-out orchestra players, including Morris Stemp (ex-Hallé). Food for thought. And I'm alarmed to realise that today is Groundhog Day. Imagine if the film came true and we had to sing Shostakovich 2 every day for the foreseeable future :p