As good as ever

I suppose it's not ENTIRELY a bad thing if the only mention your role gets in a review is "as good as ever", especially if the reviewer in question has been known, in the past, not to mention you at all. But anyway, in case anyone missed it, the Manchester Evening News very belatedly reviewed our carol concerts.

I was still listening to Christmas music until yesterday, but that's because I have a playlist of "all the Christmas music there is" and once I've started to listen to it, it feels wrong not to finish. Plus, I really like the Zither Carol! This list has grown each year and currently contains 214 tracks (some pop, some classical), so it takes a while to listen to all of it.

Christmas for the choir is finished for ten months or so, though, and this week we started on the lovely Mass in G Minor by Vaughan Williams. (Wikipedia claims it is the first mass written in a distinctly English manner since the sixteenth century, and I must admit I can't think of a counterexample.) We'll be performing this on 12th February, at a late-night performance following an interesting-looking concert whose main work is Schumann's 3rd Symphony, although I love the title of the Colin Matthews piece! Last time we did one of these post-concert events, it was the Tippett Negro spirituals, and the atmosphere was absolutely magical - I hope this one's as good, and I suspect it might be. (That Tippett performance was recorded, and if memory serves I think we heard it in a rehearsal but there was some reason why we couldn't all have copies of it - can anyone remind me?)

Anyway, I enjoyed sight-reading the Vaughan Williams on Wednesday, and am looking forward to starting work on it properly. My favourite aspect so far is that it's for double choir, and the two choirs are sitting separately. This means that us 2nd altos feel even more special, because it's much more obvious how outnumbered we are by the 1sts (I think there were literally three times as many 1sts as 2nds, last time I counted). On Wednesday we ended up totally surrounded by 2nd sops - as in, there was a circle of them enclosing us! We'd been instructed to sit in wedges so that each row contained all eight parts, but the 2nd sops had already filled all the 2nd alto spaces on the second row before any of us got there, so we started at the third row... and then a load of 2nd sops arrived late and sat behind us (and to our right as well) because there were no more seats. As a result I now know the 2nd sop part quite well but couldn't hear the men at all. Still, it'll give me a new experience next week!

I may have posted these mp3s before (we did the Sanctus for last year's vocal assessments) but here they are again anyway for those who want to practise:

Kyrie
Gloria
Credo
Sanctus
Benedictus
Agnus Dei

I've acquired a load of links over the last few weeks - I didn't want to include any of them in my Twelve Days of Christmas song posts because I knew I was less likely to keep my vow of posting for twelve consecutive days if I did! (If you didn't read any of those, do go back and look - my readership dropped each day I did them, but I enjoyed doing them anyway so I don't really care!) So, here are some things for you to read.

I suspect there'll be quite a few things about Haydn this year (he died on 31st May 1809) and here are the first: The great Haydn road trip and Long live Papa Haydn; both from the Guardian, the first about a trip to places associated with Haydn while listening to all 106 of his symphonies, and the second specifically about his vocal works.

Also from the Guardian, an article about a new film about Carl Orff, and another about footballers' tastes in pop music.

You may well be aware of last year's story about Joshua Bell busking (I thought I'd mentioned it at the time, but it looks as if I didn't). I was recently reminded of it by, of all things, a Snopes post. (In case you haven't encountered Snopes before, it's an invaluable site for checking the truth of those emails you get that tell you "this is a true story, forward it to everyone you know!") The event was actually an experiment by the Washington Post, and the full story (including a link to the video of his performance) is a very thought-provoking read, as is the followup discussion with the writer, which explains how the experiment came about and why he waited three months to write about it!

Here's a not-entirely-serious Guardian artcile about the effect of Guitar Hero on guitar design.

And some double bass related T shirts.

Another VERY interesting article by David Griggs-Janower, this time about what conductors do in rehearsals and why it's so exhausting. (The followup post, about being a teacher, is also worth a read, and the two posts together explain very well the main reason I gave up teaching!)

From ChoralBlog, a piece about church congregations not being able to sing as high as they used to. (The full original post at Soho the Dog is interesting too.)

MIke Barnes writes in the Guardian about loud noise in music causing tinnitus.

From the J-Walk blog: apparently Microsoft are introducing a thing called Songsmith, which creates an instant accompaniment as you sing. If any of you tries this I would love to hear your reports!

That's the end of my music-related links, but I have a few more non-musical ones to share. Firstly, the Big Picture continues its excellence with some amazing photos from recent events in Gaza.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, so it's great timing for an announcement that there is to be a dark sky park in Scotland. I'll definitely be visiting that as soon as I can afford the trip. (Talking of astronomical things, if you've been wondering what that very bright "star" is that you can currently see in the south west in the early evenings, it's Venus, and it sets at 8pm.)

I'm currently teaching myself Spanish in preparation for our trip to Valencia in May, and I'm relieved it's not Portugal we're going to, because I imagine it would be VERY confusing to learn Portuguese at the moment - they're changing all their spellings!

Working at RNID for over a year showed me how much I had to learn about deafness, so it doesn't surprise me to find that there are aspects of blindness that I had no idea about. For example, I had no idea, until I read this, that children learning Braille used to have to do so backwards!

Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture ends tonight, so I thought I'd mention a new banner that's recently been put up at Old Trafford. (Thanks to Republik of Mancunia for the picture.)

And from Manchester Confidential, news of an opportunity to become a hermit for two months at the Manchester Museum!

Finally, I know you've been wondering about the Vendee Globe. (I forgot to remind you about my other favourite yacht race, the Rolex Sydney Hobart race, which takes place every Boxing Day between Sydney and Hobart (Tasmania), but there were no big surprises in it this year.)

The leaders are now on the home stretch, having rounded Cape Horn and being well on their way up the Atlantic, to the east of South America. The leading British competitor is currently Samantha Davies (the one who didn't quite rescue that guy), who's in 4th place of the 12 who are still in the race, but 1800 miles behind the leader (Michel Desjoyeaux, who has won the race before - in fact, he was the winner in 2001 when Ellen MacArthur rose to fame by coming second). There's been more trauma recently, though - two more of the leading competitors have had to withdraw, because one of them (Jean Le Cam) capsized near Cape Horn (in one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world) and then the guy who rescued him (Vincent Riou) was dismasted as a result of damage caused during the rescue. Both sailors are now safely in Chile, but they might easily not have been - this is what happened to Jean Le Cam's boat...