Kimigayo

We're almost at the end of our Sea Drift immersion - the concert is in a few days. I'm looking forward to it, and on the whole I think we know it very well. We ended this week's rehearsal like last week's, by mixing ourselves up so that no-one was next to someone else singing the same part. I suspect there are a few people who don't like it when that happens, but I love it, as do most of my choir friends. Last week I was surrounded by basses and sopranos but couldn't hear any tenors, so it was nice that this week I had tenors on both sides and behind me, with sopranos interspersed. It was lovely. (And I'm glad to report that none of the sopranos near me sang a C in that bar I whinged about last week, although there were still quite a few sops who did! Hopefully they'll fix it before the piano rehearsal. But they all sang beautifully in tune this week, which is more important.)

Most of the other news this week is Japan-related. I texted Sakura (our Japanese 2nd sop) and she says her family is safe, which is good news. (One of my friends has a brother who lives in Japan - but at the other end of the country, I think - and he didn't realise anything had happened until almost 24 hours later!)

You'll no doubt be aware that the BBC Philharmonic were on tour in Japan when the earthquake happened. (That links to the MEN article, which allows comments - I have to admit that the comments flabbergasted me in their ignorance!) They've cancelled the rest of the tour now and are coming home, but their website had already reassured everyone quite quickly that they were all safe, and before then they'd kept in touch via Twitter (which, as usual, was where I'd actually found out about the earthquake in the first place). It was also via the BBC Phil Twitter feed that I learned that Daniel Harding was there too, and he went ahead with his concert on Friday, albeit with a vastly reduced audience, but one of them had walked 4 hours across Tokyo to get there!

As usual, the Big Picture has the best photos: some from Friday itself and some from the aftermath in the next day or two. BoingBoing also has some good photos, although some of them are duplicates of the Big Picture ones. And this Time Out Tokyo blog post, written by staff who were in their office during the earthquake, is fascinating. Be sure to watch the included video of Japanese earthquake-proof skyscrapers behaving as they were designed to - i.e. swaying quite a lot!

EDIT: Just saw this: a great blog post about Japan's functioning in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Do read this, it's fascinating. And would never have happened in the UK, I suspect!

A few non-Japan-related links: an interesting Observer article about female composers, which mentions our new composer in residence.

An Observer interview with Antonio Pappano, mainly about Italian music in general, but I was most interested in the stuff about Va pensiero - I could probably sing the whole of that from memory, but I didn't know most of its history.

From BoingBoing, news of two scientists who claim to have found a man who's 'beat-deaf' - i.e. he is is unable to move in time to music.

A great Guardian article in which Graham Johnson (the accompanist) describes his love of Schubert's lieder and how he got to know them.

And finally, this is both very relaxing and very difficult to do: Do nothing for 2 minutes.