"In Russia, everybody has a dog."

Well, I know I said I'd post this last night, but I fell asleep, so here's a quick version before I go to work.

Wednesday night was such fun. It was the piano rehearsal for Daphnis and Chloe with Gianandrea Noseda. I'm told there was quite a bit of swooning from certain members of the alto section when he walked in... He was full of energy and talked VERY quickly, and I should imagine many people couldn't hear a lot of what he said, but luckily I was directly in line with him and got most of it. I'd love to write reams about everything he said, but I haven't time, so I'll just list the main quotes I wrote down that amused us:

"I have to conduct in 4, unfortunately, because it's written in 4, this bloody music!"

"No sex any more. I will behave well." (by this point he'd used sexual metaphors to illustrate just about every point he'd made. Needless to say this continued for the rest of the rehearsal...)

"Kill someone with your voice!"

"I got a leg injury from it!" (this was when he described a game that used to take place at his school (in Italy - a boys' school) when he was 16 or 17 - the game involved them all piling on top of each other with no warning...)

"Lions, they are not insane."

"David, you are a great orchestra."

"[sing it] like if we take drugs." (After he clarified this, Jamie said "Well, if it's a lack of control you need...." - cue mock shock!)

"In Russia everybody has a dog. I asked one of them why. The answer? 'Because we get drunk very often, and forget where we live. The dog shows us the way home!' And in this section the 5/4 bars are just the dog." (This was my favourite thing all night - not so much this quote, as the fact that it turns out that the new bass who started on Monday is Russian! I didn't hear his name when it was announced, because the applause for "we have a new bass!" was still going on. Anyway, he spoke up at the point when the Russian dog story was introduced, and he and Gianandrea conversed in Russian for several minutes, to everyone's delight.)

EDIT: It's been pointed out to me by several people that I haven't included the premature ejaculation analogy (this is how Gianandrea described how to do a big crescendo to ff followed by subito p). I suspect this is because I was laughing so much at the time that I forgot to write it down :p

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Gianandrea left after we'd sung all of Daphnis, leaving everyone inspired. I love it when that happens - you'd think it might occur at every piano rehearsal, but it doesn't - generally only with Mark Elder, but we can now add Gianandrea to the inspirational list! Anyway, then we had time to do Beethoven 9 - at last! We spent half an hour on it - amazingly, Jamie finished early (some people near me were muttering that he finished late, but as usual they'd forgotten that piano rehearsals are scheduled to end at 9.30).

Nothing really to report on Beethoven, although it was great to sing it, especially as we sang loads of the solo bits just for fun. More work on it is promised next week. Before then, the Proms... we even practised a bit for that! Well, sort of - we ended the warmup by singing "Jerusalem". Always invigorating :-)