Two days to go before the storm unleashes its fury...

Good afternoon folks and folkesses. Pleasure to have you aboard. The sun has broken through and I have recently finished a very perculiar play so it is time to get on with writing this week's post.

Last night began in sillier-than-usual fashion if you would believe it with a Claire 2-led summer-themed warm-up (hmmm...many hyphens required for that sentence to make any grammatical sense!). It concluded, as may have been expected, with a jolly rendition of 'I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' gradually moving up a semitone each phrase - delightful. Less delightful was our humming. Often in a warm-up the leader will ask us to pick any note we like and hum on said note until our heads feel all buzzy (bone fide musical terminology). It warms the old lips up. Apparently when Claire 2 does this exercise with actors they harmonious; we however, tend to choose a note and resolutely stick to it. Cue some truly dreadful harmonics (or non-harmonics as the case may be...discords, that's the word I'm fumbling for). Worst culprit last night was, you may be surprised to hear, our resident perfect-pitch pianist Ann who proceeded to create a opera-style chord sequence. Jenny joined in and, as you can probably ascertain by this stage, the whole thing degenerated from there.

Fortunately, when it comes to humming in actual pieces of music we do fare better, which is a good job as we have quite a bit of humming to do this concert. Maestro Boy pointed to whenever 'we get the bongs'. This may sound a little perculiar but there are many 'bongs' in the 'Hebrew Love Songs'. 'Getting the bongs' btw is not a euphemism...for anything...before you start.

Maestro Boy, in his pastoral capacity, asked us if there was any music we were scared of (not generally I hasten to add...just for Saturday night - Mr Blobby's ill-feted venture into the musical world is scary but has no relevance at this point...other than providing an opportunity for Editor King to add a great link). Helen responded will the answer 'None, we are fearless'. It is btw becoming a regular slot in the blog - Helen's words of wisdom. It is not because she extrapolates excessive amounts of wisdom (though she may) but because I generally sit next to her through rehearsals so get to enjoy her asides which are numerous and hilarious in equal measure.

It was a 'Cloudburst' free night (though subsequently a number of emails have gone round about the imagery in 'Cloudburst' and, let me tell you, we are a seriously poetic bunch - in fact, perusing Rudsambee emails is a little like reading the Romanticist correspondence of Wordsworth and Coleridge at present) but we crashed on with number of other pieces and are even coping with the joys of Chinese in 'Green Fir Forest'. We then moved on to the Nokia ringtone which Sebastian (our resident cellist and jazz fiend) said was virtually impossible to sing. I concur...how perculiar. Just to confirm, we are not singing the Nokia ringtone on Saturday night though if any budding composer out there fancies putting it in four parts and adding some Estonian lyrics, then we'll give it a go. We are nothing if not open to suggestions.

So we await Saturday night with our usual heady mix of fear, excitement, anticipation and last minute Czech-learning. Hopefully we'll see you all there.

CSW