"Eyeline's to Jeremy."

"OK, guys, let's go for a take. Turnover. Roll playback, roll sound."
"Rolling."
"Rolling."
"Sound SPEED!"
"525 take 2."
"End on board B."
"Eyeline's to Jeremy."

---

We heard this many, many times yesterday (well, not the same scene or take each time, but YKWIM!) The only thing we heard more often was variations on "Could I ask the three people on the ends of those rows to move to the empty seats over there?" We were playing the Question Time audience, you see, but they had to keep moving us in order to (a) make the audience look three times as big, by overlaying different shots; (b) vary the background when we're not singing; (c) have us play different roles. I don't think I've ever moved seats so many times in the course of 12 hours. I'd estimate we all moved seats about 50 times. (Often several times in succession just for one particiular shot, because the director was being fussy.)

It was a fun day, although VERY long. We all arrived between 6.45 a.m. and 7.15 a.m., but it was at least 10 a.m. before we actually filmed anything. Before that, there was breakfast, and costume checks, and makeup queues, and RIDICULOUSLY lengthy makeup sessions (no idea why - when I've been on TV before, as a main guest (which hasn't happened for a while, but there have been several occasions!) they seem to have managed to make me look presentable in 10 minutes. So why it took 25 minutes when I was just an extra is beyond me. Oh well.

I won't go through every minute of the day, but we worked really hard - not much time to read my book. We'd expected to mime, but we ended up singing after all (without them recording the sound - that had already been done) because it's easier than miming. Definitely the highlight of the day was when we were supposed to sing to Cookie Bear, so someone went and got the costume and put it in place on stage so we had something to focus on (see picture above)... but then Jeremy (the musical director) was persuaded to put the costume on. You can't really tell from the picture here, but this was the funniest thing EVER. When he started conducting with the bear's arms, several of us were crying so hard with laughter that we were in danger of having to queue up for our makeup to be redone!



It turns out, by the way, that Jeremy is called Jeremy Holland-Smith, and I think I've worked out why he seems so familiar, even though (now I know his name) I'm pretty sure I've never worked with him before. It's because he really reminds me of a lovely guy I know called Ash Johnston, who was my sailing instructor for a while. In particular, both of them have a fantastic smile - did I mention that?

Anyway, we finished for the day a couple of minutes before 7 p.m. - several people were sure we would run over, but I was positive we wouldn't (for the same reason that the orchestra never do) and I was right :-) But we did eventually get to do some scenes with Jon Culshaw as David Dimbleby (see below). He kept bursting out laughing when he heard our lines, which was encouraging! I'm looking forward to seeing the whole thing when it's finished (hopefully I'll have got the tunes out of my head by then) but sadly that's not expected to be till Easter. Hope it's worth the wait :-)

"Sopranos, can you take a quaver out of your bitch in 300?"

When I arrived at the TV studio in Little Hulton (yes, really) this afternoon, I was ushered in through a different door to last night, and this led me through an empty studio that had Narnia in the corner. I was very impressed. You can't really tell from the photo, but all the Christmas trees (and there were a LOT) had snow on them. Very pretty. I couldn't quite work out why anyone was doing Narnia for TV when there's just been a successful film made of it, so I asked, and was told it was actually just for an Argos advert. How disappointing!

We finished the recording today, and there was a bonus - turns out TPTB were so impressed with us yesterday that they want us in another of the operas, so we sight-read (and then recorded) two bits for The Apprentice. One was called "Veni Vidi Gucci" and the other included the line "speccy four-eyed slag, rancid skanky bitch was her nickname at school". Hence the title of this post :-) This section had the altos singing the tune and the sops doing a descant - but the tune started on a top G and went back up there several times. And that's not as bad as the end of Question Time, which had us going up to a top Bb. Ouch. (I apologise to Sheena and the other people who had the misfortune to be sitting in front of me when I tried to do this!)

(The picture below is my view of the conductor. (Did I mention how lovely he is? In particular, he has an amazing smile. I very much enjoyed staring at him!) That's Sheena on the right. (And Tessa and Fanny in front of her.) I don't know the name of the lady on her left, but she shared my delight at today's most significant football result. Go Rooney! (My football results service was very popular today, although not everyone wanted to know how great United were - I was asked about Everton, Liverpool and even Chester.)



Another Jeremyism that amused me was: "A note from Richard, cos I think he's had too many KitKats - more Cookie fanaticism!" (Cookie Bear is a major character in the opera. It was supposed to be Nookie Bear, but apparently Roger deCoursey's people wouldn't allow this!)

I should stop writing, because I need to be at the studio for 7 a.m. and I still have a ton of work to do tonight. (Can you tell I'm procrastinating?) But one final thing: there was quite a bit of enthusiastic discussion, during the tea break today, about Green Wing (also about the Archers, but I don't listen to that so I wasn't interested!) So I thought it was worth pointing people towards James Henry's blog. James is one of the writers of Green Wing, and his blog is one of the best there is. It's been at the top of the list in my sidebar for quite a while, but it's possible that people don't realise who writes it. (Also, he's commented here a couple of times, so clearly he is a man with excellent taste!) There have been several occasions when a post of his has had me literally crying with laughter. A few selections to see if you share my sense of humour: James Henry on fruit, swimming, ninja attack scenes in non-ninja films, restaurant menus, and hotel laundry. Enjoy :-)

"Is it too cheesy, Richard?"

I've kind of broken the first rule of blogging in the past couple of months. Well, there isn't a universally-agreed "first rule of blogging" - try googling that phrase! - but the one that I think of as the first rule is "blog regularly, if you expect people to keep reading". And I feel a bit guilty that I haven't done that. I'm having trouble adjusting to the time demands of my new job (mainly having to leave home at 7 a.m.!) This week has been half term, so you'd think I'd have managed to post on Wednesday night after choir, but I seem to have spent the whole week either asleep or about to fall asleep. I have managed to get some other stuff done too, but nowhere near enough! Still, 2 days left...

Sadly those 2 days aren't free, because I foolishly volunteered for the Question Time Opera project. I keep vowing to myself that I won't commit myself to any more extra things... and then something new and exciting-sounding turns up, and I find myself signing up for it without checking how much time I'm committing to! Oh well. The opera is fun - first session was tonight (see picture above), and I'm glad I signed up.

(For those who don't know, the BBC has commissioned 5 half-hour comic operas from Richard Thomas, who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera. They are mostly based on TV shows: The Apprentice; Wife Swap; a Monty Pythonesque one; Panorama; and Question Time. The Panorama one is called "Drinking in Nottingham" and ends with a "flood of vomit" and everyone turning into zombies. The Question Time one stars Jon Culshaw as David Dimbleby.)

Tonight we recorded half of the choir bits; the other half will be done tomorrow afternoon, and on Sunday we spend the whole day filming (miming, rather than singing). (The call is for 6.45 a.m.!) There are quite a few Hallé singers involved - no men, because of course tonight clashed with their Schoenberg gig, but tonight we had Tessa, Fliss, Wendy and I representing the altos, and Jackie, Sheena, Zoe, Gen and of course Fanny (who got us all involved in the first place) among the sops. There was a lovely young man called Jeremy running the session - he looks really familiar, but I can't think where I know him from (and I didn't catch his surname). He did a couple of amusing tongue-twister warmups - "Yellow baby buggy bumpers" and "This wrist watch is a Swiss wrist watch" were more than my tongue could cope with!

Anyway, more (no doubt) on the opera after the next sessions, but I just want to report here that my favourite line so far is: "... but this anti-poverty bill will not work, because it is not OUR anti-poverty bill." "What would be different about YOUR anti-poverty bill?" "It would be written in a different font, and would have more words underlined." Although, a close second would be: "We are clapping a bear made out of felt, and a man whose lips are moving slightly."

(Don't expect to see this on TV any time soon, btw - they're not recording the orchestra till January.)

Hmm, just realised I haven't said anything about this week's Hallé rehearsal. I seem to have not written down any Jamieisms, although I do recall being amused a lot of the time. While looking, though, I found what I wrote down last week, which was that Jamie was told off for tutting at the age of 10, and he says this was the most traumatic event of his entire life! Bless! Anyway, we did bits of Messiah, and a couple of carols (The Wassail Song and Sir Christemas - I love that one!). We spent quite a bit of time, again, practising the Messiah runs - Gill and I were thrilled to be able to actually sing most of them in one breath. Jamie's method makes them all seem much easier - clever, that :-)

Most exciting news from Wednesday, though, which I still can't quite believe, is that I got a text from Dr Liz (who was at home being poorly) asking if I could take her place to sing alto solo in a scratch performance of Mozart's Requiem next month! She has had to drop out because it's too close to her exams. I'm very, very excited about this. And scared!

We're on the radio!

Sorry not to have warned you of this, if you'd forgotten, but we're on Radio 3 RIGHT NOW. (If you're reading this too late, catch it on Listen Again later.)

Sorry also for the delay in posting. I didn't have time to write till yesterday, and then Blogger was down... still, it all seems to be working now!

I'm sure I remember writing some Jamieisms in my Messiah score, but I just looked through it and can't find anything (although it's hard to find ANYTHING in there, there's so much scribbling). Never mind. Wednesday's rehearsal was fun, though. I'd expected it to be really boring - I like Messiah, but not the rehearsing of it. But Jamie's brainwave, to make us rediscover it, was to get us to all swap parts, so that the sops and tenors sang each other's parts (at a suitable octave) and so did the altos and basses. This was hugely entertaining, and I'm only sorry we didn't do it all the way through! We did sing through quite a few movements, though, and we also spent some time learning (again, but it's always useful) how to do the runs properly. Oh, and we all discovered our hangman drawing from last year's "His Yoke Is Easy" :p

(Ouch, just listening to the Kodaly performance... the sops and tenors were miles behind the beat on their first entry!)

Jamie also had some serious words to say on the subject of taking preparation seriously, particularly before piano rehearsals. I've already stated my feelings about the piano rehearsal, so it won't surprise you to know that I agree with everything he said. I can understand, though, how some people were upset that he was being so negative after such a successful concert, but (a) maybe they were so shocked that they didn't notice that he DID say it was good, and (b) I think the point is - if it was that good when some people weren't as prepared as they might have been, how great MIGHT it have been?

Anyway, a few links to finish. Here's a great review of last week's concert. Here's a great review of our CD. Here's an interesting site I found the other day while I was looking for something else - it tells you how to pronounce stuff in just about any language, specifically classical musicians' names and titles of works. [EDIT: For all the people searching for "how to pronounce Kodaly" that end up here, this site tells you - specifically, on this page.] And here's the home page for next year's Manchester International Festival - tickets for members go on sale tomorrow for the first few events.

And finally, I realised that when I posted about the gig, I haven't once mentioned my absolute favourite aspect, which was the bottom A from the basses on the last page of the Kodaly. My spine still tingles just thinking about it. And in a couple of minutes I'll hear it again :-)

"The Hallé Choir exploded into joyous, cosmic noise"

said The Guardian, of Saturday's gig. And the Manchester Evening News actually mentioned the choir! So it must have been good. He (Robert Beale, as usual) remembered the Oldham concert, but luckily not the memory aspect - I was worried they were going to draw comparisons. He didn't actually comment on Saturday's Beethoven specifically (other than by implication - he liked it!) but about the Kodaly he said: "This requires much of a choir: not merely learning to sing in Hungarian, but exploring a range of tone and dynamic, from the sweetest mellow concord to six-part writing at full pelt and with a top soprano line consistently high in their range. The Hallé ladies are a mainly youthful gang these days, and they achieved this with splendid tone and effective balance."

I can't decide whether to be pleased we're thought of as youthful or upset at the idea that I'm not one of the youthful ones :p

Talking of reviews, the Times doesn't seem to have made it to Manchester this weekend, making the mistake of staying in London to hear a really bad concert. Ouch! "The Cadogan Hall was sold out, with an audience who were either deaf or in denial." Hee!

Other news: we finally have a broadcast date for the People's Chorus. Saturday 9th December. \o/

Messiah tomorrow. Probably (sadly) no plans to do it from memory. But I live in hope :-)

Why can't men say "Der"?

Well, men obviously can say "der", but why is it that they have to be constantly reminded to say it as "deer", and they do it brilliantly, and then 5 minutes later they're back to "dair"? It's not even as if this instruction has ever changed - it's been the same very time we've EVER done anything in German. (I'm sure there are some men who pronounce it perfectly every time, but they are sadly overshadowed by those who don't.)

The picture at the top, by the way, is Suzanne, who's our new 1st alto whose first concert was last night. In recognition of this, Jamie gave his flowers to her. Sweet eh? (It was Dimitri's first concert as well, but Jamie only had one lot of flowers and he happened to pass Suzanne first!)

The concert (Kodaly and Beethoven, for those who aren't keeping track) went pretty well - the audience seemed to love it. I enjoyed it in the end - it's hard NOT to enjoy performing when spontaneous cheers erupt at the end - but I can't help suspecting how much better it would have been if we'd done the Beethoven from memory. Like many of the choir, the Oldham performance of 1999 is one of my best memories of all my time in the choir. I was SO proud to be in the choir that night. And last night just felt as if the choir had gone backwards - how come the 1999 choir could memorise something but the 2006 choir couldn't? The 2006 choir is SO much better vocally, but there are too many people in it whose general attitude seems to be "I'm not doing that, why should I?"

It's unfortunate, of course, that the Beethoven wasn't rehearsed in the summer as scheduled, so people didn't get as early a start as they needed. Although the Ravel and Kodaly obviously needed much more rehearsal than the Beethoven, I think it would have really helped people to have sung through it once (which would have taken 20 minutes). But it's also unfortunate that Jamie's message, via David Lawrence, that people who'd never sung the piece before and couldn't learn it in time could stand at the back with their copies, was apparently interpreted by most of the choir as "oh, so we don't have to do it from memory then", with the result that Jamie was confronted, at the PIANO REHEARSAL of a piece that we were due to sing from memory, with the sight of at least 80% of the choir with their copies out. (I didn't count how many people it was, but it looked like at least that many to me - does anyone disagree?) And David Lawrence must have told him that when we sang it from memory at the end of the previous rehearsal, there were a significant number of people (not 80%, but quite a few, and by no means just new people) who refused to even try, and stood there with their copies. Faced with all these circumstances, I can understand why Jamie reached the decision he did, although I still don't like it.

Sorry to whinge, but I'm just fed up with life in general at the moment, and although I get like this from time to time, choir is generally the one thing that cheers me up and takes my mind off other problems - so when choir is ADDING to my bad mood, I'm unimpressed. Also, I'd like to point out that although I'm sure lots of you are thinking "it's all very well for her to go on and on about memorising, she already knew it!", the reason I've appeared so confident is that I have put in a LOT of work on the Beethoven in the last few weeks. I did already know it from memory, it's true, but singing the tenor part of it in Todmorden a few months ago really unsettled my knowledge of the alto part, so I've had to put in extra effort to make sure I didn't sing the wrong part by mistake. And then there were changes, for example a couple of bits where the 2nd altos were asked to sing the tenor part, so they needed extra practice because I had the original version so firmly in my head. And then on Wednesday night there were a few details that Mark asked for, which I hadn't been doing, so I spent quite a bit of time on Thursday getting those bits into my head. Thursday was a horrible day anyway, as I've already said, but to get to choir and find that all that work had been wasted was just the last straw. And I don't blame Jamie - I blame the people who caused him to reach that decision because they just couldn't be bothered to try.

Anyway, the anonymous-commenters-who-hate-me will probably only hate me more for saying all that, but I don't really care. (Well, I do, but not enough to delete it.) But I do have some fun things to finish with - Jamieisms from yesterday!

There were a few alto-related ones, not all complimentary - for example, when he was talking about the end, and said "it's not over till....." and then looked at the altos! The cheek! There was also "There's no faffing around, altos!" (this referred to the first entry in the Beethoven, but I'm not sure now why it was so funny!) And of course "Altos, on that extraordinarily altoid moment..." (this referred to our solo "steht")

There was lots of amusement over Jamie's loo-chain-pulling analogy, which concerned the stressing of the crotchets rather than the minims in the main theme. (The sops demonstrated this an octave lower in order to save their voices, and most of them sang a D below middle C before realising what they'd done. Amazing!)

The one that amused me most, though, was: "Now. Your bathroom. Page 40." And that's because I still have no clue what the bathroom had to do with it! It was the start of the big fugue, though - can anyone explain the bathroom link? Unless it's just back to the loo-chain-pulling...

I must go do some work now. But I almost forgot - the M.E.N. gave our CD a 5-star review, although typically they didn't mention the choir. But Graham E says The Hills was played on Radio 3 this afternoon, so at least someone's paying attention!

Imagine yourselves as 3D beasts....

I'm not going to write much tonight, because I'm in SUCH a bad mood - mainly due to something that happened at work today, but not helped by tonight's rehearsal, which was good in parts but mostly just made me crosser. Mainly, as you can probably guess, I'm absolutely furious about the Beethoven-from-memory issue (not so much the decision itself, which is, I suppose, understandable, but the circumstances that led to it). I could write about that at length, and the only reason I don't plan to is because I just don't have the energy. So at least the anonymous-commenters-who-hate-me won't have too much to complain about.

Also, it's my birthday for another 13 minutes :-)

Just wanted to share a couple of things. Firstly, I had to go to Birmingham on Tuesday for an examining board meeting, and in so doing I got back too late to attend what was probably my last committee meeting. But the (Birmingham) meeting was held near Symphony Hall, so I got the chance to pop in and take a photo of one of my favourite paintings (above) which is just inside the front door.

On the train I read a fabulous book, The Lies of Locke Lamora. If you like fantasy, and roguish thieves, I recommend it very highly :-)

Have a listen to this version of Wuthering Heights. I like it a LOT. It's from a recent album by the Puppini Sisters. Great fun!

And finally, I just remembered, tonight, that I meant to dig out my books and write about unusual stuff in Beethoven 9. Well, I've got the books, and I'll write that post tomorrow. Maybe. But only if it's better than today!

Did you miss me?

Sorry to have been AWOL for a while. I've been struggling to fit sufficient work and sleep into my life, and this wasn't helped by being in Wales last weekend for Rachel's wedding (of which more in a moment). I've been playing catch-up ever since, but tonight was thankfully free, so I thought I'd write a bit before falling asleep.

Not much directly choir-related stuff to write, actually. No Jamieisms, because there's been no Jamie - he's in Mexico with his chamber choir, so we've had David Lawrence for the past two weeks. He's done a good job, of which the highlight was undoubtedly on Wednesday when he kept saying the altos were the best. Clearly a very wise man :-) We did actually sing the whole of both the Kodaly and the Beethoven on Wednesday night, the latter entirely from memory. Well, when I say "entirely"... there was a significant minority who refused to even try it, including quite a few people who have been in the choir for many years and certainly sung the work before. I've heard several of these, over the past few months, complaining that they are much too busy to learn things from memory, and anyway they find it really difficult. Well... I have to admit that I don't find it that hard to learn things, but it DOES take me time, and I'm not not busy, IYSWIM. I have a strong suspicion that if some of these people actually tried to do it the way I do, they would find it much easier and quicker - I think some of them have developed a mental block and convinced themselves they will never be able to do it.

My method? Well, it has two main aspects. Both are based on the theory that the only way to learn to sing something from memory IS TO SING IT FROM MEMORY. (I said this to Graham Worden on Wednesday, and he thought it sounded like a Zen koan!) So, what you do is to take EVERY POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITY to try singing the work (all or part of it) from memory. That means you sing along to it in the car on every journey you make, until you know it. But if you know you're not confident enough of the notes to stick to the part with no other singers round you, rely more heavily on the second part of the method, which is to SING FROM MEMORY IN REHEARSALS. Do this even before you know the work well. Just try a line at a time. You'll have the support of people round you, and you can glance down at your score after the line to check what you got right and what you didn't. You'll find that you already know more than you think you do. But I can't imagine how people can ever learn anything without trying this way, yet there were loads of very experienced choir members on Wednesday still looking at their scores throughout. Amazing.

Anyway, Rachel's wedding! This was absolutely fantastic. The picture at the top of this post has Rachel and Laurie just after they'd become Mr & Mrs Cooper, outside Llandudno Town Hall, where the wedding took place last Saturday. Rachel's holding Riley, who's now 13 months old and insisted on being held by his mum all day (her arms were really aching by the evening!) The ceremony started with Riley being held by Laurie's mum, but he made a fuss as soon as he realised he couldn't see his mum, so Laurie's mum moved till he could... still not enough, so in the end Rachel had to take him and hold him through the whole ceremony (she got a big round of applause for doing so!)

The day was gloriously sunny (well, it did rain later, but only when the reception was well under way) and the ceremony was lovely. There was an 11-piece choir consisting of the usual suspects, and we sang Sincerely as Rachel came in (that's an old 50s song that's Rachel's favourite - we sing it in Pleiades, and the version at the wedding was an a cappella version of it). At the end we sang an a cappella version of Love Is All Around as a surprise for Laurie, who loves Wet Wet Wet. I wasn't sure at the time that he'd noticed what we were singing, but Rachel said afterwards that he recognised it from the intro :-)

After the ceremony, we all went up to the top of the Great Orme, where the reception was being held in the ski lodge there. It was necessarily informal, because as part of the invitation there were tickets to use the ski lodge facilities - skiing lessons, tobogganing and sno-tubing. I didn't try skiing, because I tried once before and was REALLY bad at it. But I did the sno-tubing and tobogganing. I was a little disappointed that neither was on actual snow (as usual, I was too hot all day) but both were great fun. Meg and Tom and Bruce and Geoff and I spent half an hour on the sno-tube slope - I suspect we would have stayed longer if every descent hadn't been followed with dragging the tube back to the top of the hill. It was incredibly funny though - not sure why, but I can't remember the last time I laughed that much :-)

We queued up for the toboggan later in the afternoon - huuuuuuuuuge queue (an hour, I think we stood there, but we did have a good chat) and the eventual toboggan run didn't really live up to expectation - it was fun (and you do get to go round twice) but not quite worth an hour's queue! Oh well. In between the sno-tubing and tobogganing, there was a barbecue, and there'd been a huge array of nibbles when we first arrived, and later there was fondue (all three sorts). And cake, of course! So everyone was quite stuffed by the end of the day.

I'd done 5 CDs of background music, at Rachel's request, to be played during the day (the wedding was at noon, so it was a long time till the evening!) but the people behind the bar somehow managed to play one of them three times and some of the others not at all. Never mind. In the evening there were DJs, but I think my music was better :p (plus, as with most DJs, they played their music far too loudly and we couldn't understand a word of whatever they said in between!)

Can't think of much else to say about the wedding, other than that it was fabulous. But Rachel is hoping to come back to choir soon, so she can tell you about it herself :-)

Before I finish, though, a few more pictures!

This is the only one I managed to get with Rachel actually looking at the camera...


This is the Alpine Lodge on top of the Great Orme, where the reception took place.


This was the view from the lodge. After dark this was even prettier, with twinkly lights all round the bay. Lovely. (Note toboggan track in foreground.)


Laurie and Rachel cutting the cake - bit fiddly, because the wedding cake consisted of a huge array of yummy fairy cakes, but they managed!


And, on a non-wedding note, here are some links I've accumulated since I last posted....

Our English Landscapes CD is out at last.

A thing about people who clap too soon.

An ingenious attempt by the Hallé marketing department (presumably) to imply that next week's gig was arranged only after the Beethoven 9 prom was cancelled last month.

I just discovered there's another Beetham Tower! Looks like ours will be finished first though.

An article about the greatness of non-London orchestras. Mentions both Mark and Gianandrea.

Russell Watson has just had brain surgery, and it looks as if he's not out of the woods yet.

The website of next week's tenor soloist, Stefan Margita, wasn't working last time I looked, but it is now. Oddly enough it has no mention of our gig, unless I'm missing something... He's still listed on the Hallé website as taking part, but there's still plenty of time for Mark's curse to kick in!

Gianandrea got a promotion! And there was, eventually, a review of the Ravel gig, although needless to say it doesn't mention the choir. Oh, and talking of reviews, I was a bit disappointed in the MEN review of the Hallé's recent Mahler 5, which was dedicated to John MacMurray. I wasn't at the concert, but Naomi was telling me about it at the weekend and I'm really sorry I missed it. It sounds as if it might have been the best concert the Hallé have ever played. Did any of the rest of you go?

And finally, the two oddest blog searches recently: how do you pronounce the german in Brahms German Requiem, and full-bladder concert. The mind boggles!