"Then you sing about carnal doo-dahs...”

I went home on my own tonight (Alison was poorly) but had a huge grin on my face for most of the time. This was for 3 main reasons. The most immediate was something Daphne said to me as we were all leaving the rehearsal, but the grin would've been there anyway as a result of Mark Elder - I'm not sure what it is about him that's so inspirational, but he manages it every single time. More of that in a second. But first, the third reason (and you'd better sit down before reading any further): the BFBABTEIGW is now almost right! It got better each time we did it, and by the last time I could hear more right versions around me than wrong ones. I think this is probably due to Clare - I suddenly heard (the second or third time we did it) the correct version being sung very clearly by one person behind me, and I turned to see who it was, and it was Clare, who appeared to be as irritated as me. Now she usually gets things right, so I'm sure she was singing it right all along, but maybe she just decided to sing louder in order to banish the wrong version. Whatever, I'm very grateful to her. There's a good chance it'll be right on the night now, and it would've spoiled the performance for me if it'd been wrong.

As for the rest of the rehearsal, it was unexpectedly wide-ranging. We'd expected to just do the Ritual Dances with Mark, with maybe a sing through the Spirituals if he finished early. But we also did Elgar and Mascagni. (The Mascagni was just a sing-through so that we'd heard it at least once with all the parts together - it's going to be great fun, from the sound of it. The tenors sounded as if they were getting properly into the spirit of the drinking song... Bruce, in particular, was plainly having a fabulous time!) The Elgar was unintended, I think, but when Mark finished everything he wanted to do on the Tippett, there was half an hour left, and he asked if we had anything else we could entertain him with, so we sang straight through the first half of the Elgar. Mark appeared to like it; he was mouthing the tenor part throughout (not because they were at fault, I hasten to add, he was just joining in!)

We spent almost an hour on the Spirituals before Mark turned up, and they're now much better. I've already mentioned the BFBABTEIGW. (Which, by the way, I listened to on two different recordings today. The Sixteen managed to get that bar right, but the LSO Chorus didn't, despite having an accompanying orchestra playing the right notes!) The key changes between some of the movements were still being problematic, particularly from Go Down Moses to By and By, so Jamie rehearsed that one a lot so as to get the muscle memory to kick in. Oh, and what Daphne said to me (that caused me to go home grinning) was that some of the sopranos had come up with a theory that the reason the choir is finding that particular segue difficult to pitch is that By and By starts with just choir 1 singing... i.e. the 2nd altos aren't. And, more specifically, that means that I'm not singing, and, according to Daphne, I am "known as a note-getter". Now, I'm not convinced I have anywhere near as much influence as they're implying, but it's nice to know they think that :-)

We had a chance to do a quick revision of the Ritual Dances and the aforementioned whizz through Cavalleria Rusticana before Mark turned up at 8.30 to run through the Ritual Dances. All went fine. He's looking forward to the weekend - apparently "all the London critics are coming" to the Tippett festival. Oh, and he supplied my favourite quote of the night: “This is, to my certain knowledge, the only opera libretto containing the word ‘sperm’ ... “