Aggressive Russian Funky Gibbon

From last night's warm-up:

Jamie: Aggressive funky gibbon.
Choir: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Jamie: Aggressive RUSSIAN funky gibbon!
Choir: (with a much darker vowel sound) Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

As with so many Jamieisms, you probably had to be there!

I'm on my way back to Ashton shortly for today's rehearsal and concert, but thought I'd do a bit of catch-up blogging first. (We rehearsed on Tuesday night instead of Wednesday this week, but I haven't had the time to blog since - I don't think there was anything fascinating to say, though.) My feet are still aching from last night. There were no seats - no-one had mentioned that this would be the case - so most of us stood up for an hour and three quarters without a break, followed by another three quarters of an hour after the break. Plus, the rehearsal finished almost 10 minutes late, so you can imagine that lots of us were not in the best of moods by the time we left. I must say, though, that the fact that we did the Bach last really helped cheer me up, because it sounded AMAZING in that acoustic :-)

The lack of seats isn't the only problem at the church. Poor Jonathan is having to play from a position behind the choir, which means that he can't see Jamie AT ALL, and (as he pointed out), when he's playing at all loudly, he can't hear anything either... so I guess we'll just have to follow him and hope! I don't think he's very happy about the situation, but unfortunately I also can't see a solution. It's just as well he's so brilliant, because if anyone CAN perform under such adverse circumstances, it'll be him. (The organ's not spectacularly great, either - plus, as Jamie said, when listing its limitations, "It's just not a violin!")

The thing that annoyed me the most last night, though, was that there was a man there - I don't know who he was, but possibly the teacher of our solo cellist. Why did he annoy me? Well, she was playing from the back of the church, at the end of the aisle from Jamie. And this man, for no reason that I can understand, repeatedly stood up and walked up and down the aisle, i.e. along the DIRECT LINE OF SIGHT between the cellist and the conductor. Even if she could see past him, it MUST have been a distraction. And the guy was presumably a professional musician, so why on earth couldn't he realise that? It was immediately obvious to all of us. Argh. And then, to make matters worse, he listened, along with the rest of us, to Jamie's explanation of why it's ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL that no-one moves a muscle on the last page of the Tavener, and that we need to rehearse that aspect as much as the music. And what did he then do? When we got to the last page a minute later, he chose that moment to get up from his seat and wander across the aisle to sit on the other side. ... Maybe he's just a chronic attention-seeker, but I was shaking my head in disbelief at how ignorant he was.

Anyway, I have no doubt that the concert will be great (assuming Mr Ignorant can keep still, that is!) Jane, the cello soloist, is fabulous (even if she is playing a G sharp instead of a G natural for the last note - I presume it's a deliberate change by Jamie, since she's done that every time and he hasn't commented, but it sounds so wrong!). Maggie, of course, sounds amazing. And I think we sound pretty good ourselves!