Are you the famous Hallé blogger?

This is what a guy said to me today as I went past him to get to my seat at the Bridgewater Hall for the BBC4 People's Chorus thing. Needless to say I was delighted :-) Mind you, I was wearing my "I'm blogging this"> T-shirt, along with (like everyone else) a sticker with my name on, so I guess it was a bit of a clue!

The whole event was pretty fabulous. (There was a Guardian blogger there too, btw - see here and here.) I nearly didn't go - I was so tired when I woke up, plus I still have a sore throat and a cough, plus... footy! But I'm glad I did, because it's not an experience I'm likely to repeat any time soon. (I was surprised to hear that one Hallé singer left at lunchtime because she wasn't enjoying it, because everyone else I spoke to - and I counted 14 Hallé people, but there may have been more - was loving it as much as I was.)

The standard was much higher than I was expecting. So either the BBC were really good at selecting people, or only really good people applied. And it sounded as if most people had practised, because there were hardly any problems with notes, even where Tallis had done one of his clashes. (I have to admit I hadn't even looked at my music - I was relying on my l33t sight-reading skills (I had to resist the urge to type "skillz" then, I must admit...) and luckily they didn't let me down.) I started off with choirs 3 and 4 (I was singing tenor in choir 3, along with Paul and Richard; Dr Liz was singing alto in the same group) and we were joined by choirs 1 and 2 after the morning coffee break and choirs 5, 6, 7 and 8 after lunch. (Lunch involved the choir 3 Hallé group going to the Rain Bar to watch the first half of the England game while eating. We had to go back to the hall at half time, but I got text updates (silently!) after that - very helpful of England to not do anything interesting in the second half!)

The most fascinating thing in the hall was actually the camera in the picture above. We think it's called a boom camera, although when I just looked that up, it seems that the proper term might be jib camera. Whatever it's called, it was fascinating. There was just one guy controlling it, and he could make it go anywhere and point in any direction, seemingly effortlessly. And all the movements were so smooth! It was almost like an alien lifeform - it reminded me of the Martian in The War of the Worlds. I'm sure I wasn't the only person who spent most of my unoccupied minutes during the rehearsal just staring at it open-mouthed. So if I'm gaping when I'm on TV, that'll be why!

The music was the highlight, though. Spem in Alium sounded just wonderful. The first time we sang it with all 8 choirs together, spines were well and truly tingled. It was the spatial aspect that made it so magical - they'd arranged the choirs so that 1 to 4 were in the stalls, and 5 to 8 in the circle, with 5 above 4 and 8 above 1. That meant that when the choirs came in in order, which happened several times, the sound just gradually swirled round the whole hall. And sitting in the middle of it all, it was... what's the 8-part version of "quadrophonic sound"? Each of the choirs - including the one I was part of - reached my ears from a different direction, and I'm not sure I can adequately convey in words what an amazing effect it was. Wow.

Everything went so well that we actually finished early. We might have finished even earlier if one of the audience hadn't forgotten to turn their phone off - it rang in the worst possible place, i.e. one of several general pauses in the piece. So we had to perform it again. It was much better the second time, though, so it was just as well. (That reminds me of a Great Choral Moment that I meant to post ages ago, actually. It was when we were rehearsing Mahler 2 a couple of years ago. You know how when the choir comes in, it's marked ppp? Well, we'd spent a while trying to get it quieter and quieter, and Jamie finally pronounced himself satisfied, but asked us to do it again one more time to see if it could be even quieter. And that's when Alison's phone rang - and not just any ringtone, but the opening of Night on the Bare Mountain (you know the really fast, high triplet quaver bit), which was one of my creations. Hee! I was extremely amused.) (I used to make lots of ringtones for people, but people have got better at finding their own, so I don't often do it these days.)

Great day, although unfortunately I felt quite ill by the time I got home - Manchester was just so hot, and I'd been too hot almost all day (thank goodness for the air conditioning in the Bridgewater Hall, but I wasn't in there all day, and all the time I wasn't, I just felt faint and dizzy from the heat). Bear in mind that I'm usually too hot at WHGS, even on days when most of the rest of the choir are keeping their coats on and asking for the heating to be turned up. So you can imagine how hot I felt on an actual hot day! I was going to go to bed as soon as I got home, but Doctor Who was just starting, so I thought I may as well watch that while I cooled down, and by the time it had finished - and I'd been in my nice cool house for 45 minutes - I felt fine :-)

What did everyone else think of the day?

EDIT: To change the subject completely, just noticed someone searching for "how to pronounce pie jesu" and not having much luck. It's pee-ay yay-zoo.

EDIT 2: The Guardian blogger posted again and reminded me that I forgot to mention the "We've come from Barnsley" moment :-)

EDIT 3: It seems this post is now the number one Google result for "how to pronounce Jesu"! This being the case, I should clarify that the pronunciation is yay-zoo if it's Latin (e.g. 'Pie Jesu') but Jeez-you (or sometimes Jee-zoo) if it's English (e.g. 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring'). Hope that helps :-)