"He wants a devout sit!"

(That's Mark's instruction for the start of the last movement of Mahler 3, as relayed tonight by Jamie. I can't wait to see people's attempts at this...)

A fun rehearsal tonight. With quite a few LOL moments. The biggest was one where you probably had to be there - during Ave Verum, when Jamie said "Basses, you've got the danger note in your part. We're in what key?", and somebody blew their nose, really loudly :-)

Another was Jamie saying "My tongue gets in there much sooner than yours, ladies!" ... and I can't even remember why! But it was definitely during Mahler 3, not long after he said "What d'you call the thing that hits the bell?" and Gill suggested "The donger?"

I must say it was great fun to sing Mahler 3 again. I expect some of the sops are a bit upset not to be singing the top part (the Youth Choir girls are doing that) but if so they kept it to themselves. I gave out (to the 2nd altos) copies of the single sheet copy I did last time we sang it (when we had to learn it from memory - I can learn things quicker if they're on a single sheet). I was horrified when it was pointed out that I'd missed out one of the repeated "bimm bamm" bars... no-one noticed last time! Now I'll have to copy it again! On the plus side, it does show that the current 2nd altos are more observant than the ones who went to Verbier :p

The most fun part of Mahler 3 tonight, actually, was Jamie's jazzy piano accompaniment to figure 6. He only played it to make us stay in time, but it was great. Possibly better than what Mahler wrote!

At the end of the rehearsal, Jamie gave us a quick rundown of what we're doing next season (normally Mark or Geoff Owen would do this, but they were both unavailable and TPTB wanted to inform the choir ASAP). I hesitated about mentioning it here, because in the past we've been asked to keep the info to ourselves until the press release. But no such instruction was given tonight, and in any case Graham tells me that the info about the new season is already in the public domain (although not on the Hallé website yet, I just looked). So here you are:

23rd September: Daphnis and Chloe (Ravel) with BBC Phil & Gianandrea Noseda
14th October: Psalmus Hungaricus (Kodaly) AND Beethoven 9, with Mark Elder, and soloists including the tenor Stefan Margita (his website doesn't work for me; maybe it doesn't like Macs)
27th October: Survivor from Warsaw (Schoenberg) - with BBC Phil & Gianandrea Noseda, men only, in Hebrew!
December: Messiah with Nicholas Kraemer
December: Carol concerts with Jamie
11th February 2007: Mozart's Mass in C minor with Mark
6th May 2007: a French concert with Mark, ending in Poulenc's Gloria
3rd June 2007: The Kingdom (Elgar) as part of a weekend celebrating Elgar's 150th birthday and Mark Elder's 60th (both on 2nd June)

So our languages next season will definitely include French, German, Hebrew, English, Latin, and Hungarian (which Jamie says is easier than Russian, but we'll be starting it in July regardless!) Maybe Jamie will manage to get some more into the carol concerts - Spanish and Russian and Portuguese and - Italian! I've just realised that looks like a season with no Italian! That can't be good for the voice!

And finally, I feel an urge to give you some mp3s. It's been a while :-)

Mahler 3, 5th movement (4.8 MB)

Coconut (Harry Nilsson) (4.5 MB)

Manchester (The Beautiful South) (5.4 MB)

The latter two have been on my brain for weeks. The coconut one is of course because of the Lime Coke advert. The new Beautiful South song is fun, especially as it sounds at first as if it's an anti-Manchester song, but then it becomes quite the opposite \o/