"Utterly thrilling singing"

Well, I think the Manchester Evening News review of our concert is possibly the best review we've ever had for anything - but then Thursday night was one of the best concerts we've ever done! I'm told that there's also a 5-star review in the Guardian, but it hasn't made it to their website yet. I'll add the link here when it appears.

EDIT: Guardian review. Doesn't mention the choir at all (or the orchestra, for that matter!) but since he gives the concert 5 stars I think we can assume he liked it all :-)

The concert was so good that no-one even grumbled about having to stay afterwards till 10.30 for a patching session - we were all in too good a mood! It turns out that the reason for this very unusual scheduling was that not only was Bryn not there today (due to his Welsh Proms concert), he wasn't there on Friday either (presumably he was rehearsing for today), so the only chance to record his bits was in the rehearsal on Wednesday, in the concert on Thursday, and in the patching session afterwards.

We've now finished all the patching for the recording, and it all went brilliantly - we even finished slightly early both tonight and last night, which was much appreciated. The early finishes were particularly surprising given the huge number of coughs from the audience during the concert - there was a note in the front of the programme asking them to be particularly careful to muffle coughs because the concert was being recorded, but I guess lots of people didn't buy a programme, because they coughed NONSTOP. And always in the quietest bits! I mean, someone even coughed in the very first bar of the piece, and someone else did an explosive sneeze in the bar of silence when Gerontius had just died. Unbelievable. I do wonder whether all those people would have even attempted to muffle their coughs if they'd realised that for every time there was a cough, about 300 musicians had to spend several minutes re-recording that bit, at considerable expense. And that's quite apart from the fact that the drama was repeatedly interrupted. Argh!

However, all the coughing bars have now been patched, and we re-recorded everything else again too just to try to get it even better (although it was pretty good in the first place - see review!) I'll be interested to see whether it's sold as a live CD when it eventually comes out - it was recorded live, but there was so much patching necessary due to the coughing that I wouldn't call the result live. But then maybe that's how all live CDs are? I don't think I've done one before. Does anyone know?

(By the way, I noticed the recording company's name on the side of their van and looked them up - and the producer has his own separate website too. Lots of impressive stuff on both sites.)

I won't try to single out any of my favourite moments from the last few days, because there are so many - but there is one moment I wanted to mention. When we finished our last-minute rehearsal just before the concert on Thursday, several of us made a dash to the toilets, but Judith was ahead of everyone because she still had to get changed. I was right behind her when she rushed backstage, so I witnessed her run right into Bryn Terfel. She said something to him in Welsh (I'm assuming it was "sorry!") and he seemed delighted! And that's just reminded me that I meant to ask her what it was he said...


Anyway, the Gerontius project is finished, and it seems REALLY weird to realise that I won't be singing any of it again any time soon - it feels as if I've sung it every day for months! I need to update my "things to watch out for in Gerontius" list, because I noticed several things this week that I've never spotted before - for example, sleighbells in the Demons' Chorus! That was a surprise!

The next singing I will be doing is Pleiades (my band) on Monday night, and a singing lesson the following week... but the next choir thing is starting Mahler 2 in September. Can't wait - I love Mahler 2. We're doing it from memory, which I'm very pleased about. I understand there were some copies given out yesterday, but if there was an announcement about this I certainly didn't hear it! But no problem, because I have a full score. I'll post an mp3 at some point soon in case anyone wants a sneak preview.

I'm still enjoying Last Choir Standing - much more so tonight (I watched it just now) because we finally got to see whole songs, and there was more singing than talking. Tonight I agreed with just about all the judges' comments (and could usually predict what they were going to say) but not with their eventual decisions. I would have removed Dreemz the first time rather than the Brighton Gay Men's Ghorus (although Dreemz did get removed in the end), and the choir I liked best was the Alleycats, who didn't make it through. But the judges were correct when they pointed out the tuning problems - such a pity, because I would have loved to see more of that choir. And the tuning problems weren't THAT bad, and other choirs weren't always much better. I thought the Alleycats should have got more credit for doing very difficult arrangements very well, especially as there were so few of them. But I did like Sense of Sound very much too, and Ysgol Glanaethwy were OK but a bit boring, I thought. (Oh, and there's a brief article about the programme from a choral director here.)

What else do I have to tell you? Let's see...

Choral outrage in Edinburgh.

A feature about sign names. (I have acquired three different sign names since working at RNID... I wonder if you can guess what they are!)

Via Tenon Saw, a useful online metronome (it also plays an A on request!)

I mentioned Bachtrack last time, and they've contacted me since then to say that they'd love to have more choirs contributing. I believe that moves are afoot to get our concerts included, but if any of you are in other choirs and want to get your concerts listed, you just need to go to the site and register. It's free publicity, and since the site was featured in the Guardian (that's where I found out about it) I imagine they get lots of hits. What have you got to lose?

I also mentioned the Soweto Strings TV programme being repeated - if you still haven't seen it, you can see it online via the BBC iPlayer for the next few days.

And, finally, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! If you're reading this after Sunday, you've already missed the free download of this, but you may want to watch out for future developments. If you're a Joss Whedon fan (particularly of his Buffy musical episode), you will love this. If not - maybe not, but you never know!

Anyway, I need to go to bed so I can get up in time to go see the Tall Ships :-)