Hands up who has ever felt precise AND mellow - at the same time....?

Well, the MEN review thinks we all were. I suppose there are worse things to be called. We did better than the soprano soloist, who wasn't mentioned at all (at least not in connection with the Fauré)!

A few bits of other news to pass on, so this will be a bit listish:

Mark is conducting the Last Night of the Proms! This is probably something everyone knew except me, but I'm pointing it out in case you missed it. All the details are now online. Oh, and it appears we're not in the Proms in the Park again - it's the BBC Phil. (With the ubiquitous Heather Stott!)

Jamie's Oxford chamber choir is doing something interesting-looking in June. (On a Wednesday night, too, so I guess he won't be conducting us that night...) It's called the Oxford Blues service - "Choral Evensong in the jazz idiom, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3" - and looks like great fun! "The work deliberately allows scope for improvisation from both the singers and conductor...."

Incidentally, I recently discovered that the "Master Tallis's Testament" idea for a concert programme is not new to us - see this post (from the On An Overgrown Path blog over a year ago). I wonder whether or not Jamie knew about that before he concocted ours. Great minds do think alike, though :p

Oh, and the media interest in the Manchester Passion has died down now, but I did see this article on the Guardian blog this week, which mentions it in fairly glowing terms.

For those who've signed up for the People's Chorus, Barbara points out this site to help you learn it. The BBC site says we will know by 12th May whether we're in it or not, and that there will be links to websites with the music on them.

And finally, I've just remembered that I planned to write something about the War of the Worlds live show. The following is an excerpt from the LJ post I did about it, so to anyone who is on my LJ list, apologies for the duplication!

I accidentally saw The War of the Worlds twice last Sunday. First, the Tom Cruise film, which it's possible I might have almost enjoyed (although not a lot) if it hadn't claimed to be "The War of the Worlds". As it was, I didn't.

Then, that night, I saw the live show of the Jeff Wayne version. (Times review here.) It had special effects that were fairly laughable - probably not only less than a millionth of the budget for the Tom Cruise film, but I wouldn't be surprised if the budget was less than 10% of the special effects for *McFly* (which was the last show I saw at the MEN Arena). It also had a film playing on a screen behind the musicians most of the way through, when there were no live soloists onstage. And this film looked as if it had been filmed on someone's phone and edited with free software. Oh, and (I'm sure this is the bit you'll all have read about) it had a disembodied head which was supposed to look like Richard Burton in his heyday, which moved its mouth in sync with the narration (and waggled its eyebrows alarmingly from time to time - and it winked during the curtain call...) And it had Russell Watson playing a small role (Parson Nathaniel), and I really hate Russell Watson.

And yet.

It was FABULOUS. I LOVED it. Even without the comparison with Tom Cruise I would've loved it. And I hadn't expected to love it quite as much as I did, so I wanted to examine the reasons behind this experience, because I was thinking about this during the show.

See, what was great was that they played the whole album, live, so that it sounded more or less exactly like the recording. And of course this is not always the most exciting thing to do in a live performance - I know many people (including myself) who would rate a gig as fairly boring if there were NO changes from versions I'd heard before. But in this case it was vital. The whole audience appeared to be more or less the same age as me (I'd estimate there were at most 10% there who were more than 10 years older or younger than me). And EVERYONE my age owned this album. It came out in 1978 (when I was in the 3rd year at school) and was played to death for years afterwards. I had a freaky experience with it on my first astronomical camping trip in 1980 (long story). In the past 28 years, I've heard it gradually less frequently, but it's never quite left my head, and I think you'd be hard-pushed to find someone in their late 30s/early 40s who doesn't think of this album whenever the phrase "War of the Worlds" is mentioned.

So, actually seeing it live was an unbelievable thrill. The visual aspect wasn't all that thrilling, but seeing the orchestra (who played far less than I'd always thought) and a band including HERBIE FLOWERS on bass (I'd totally forgotten that was him), and then to cap it all JUSTIN HAYWARD singing his original bits (he is 60 this year but didn't sound any different to how he used to with the Moody Blues)... wow.

And I just kept thinking how very familiar it all was. To the extent that, for example, everyone in the audience knew exactly when the interval would be, because we all owned the album on vinyl and knew when side 1 ended. And it occurred to me that today's younger music-listening generation will never have that feeling, as a result of shuffle play and single tracks from iTMS etc. And I'm sure none of them are worried about that at all - well, neither am I really, but it does sadden me slightly to know that shared musical experiences like the one I witnessed that night are a dying breed.