Last night I made schoolboy error of forgetting I was leading warmup until two minutes before the rehearsal - duh! - so it was another outing for that old family favourite the Cheesy Wotsit Song. Beautiful as always, and now we can wander round with an irritating repetitive song in our heads for the rest of the week.
We had a few folks missing but we jollied along in typical Rudsambee fashion, beginning with a run through of the songs for Douglas' daughter's wedding. This is coming up a week on Saturday and all seems to be in hand (just in case the happy couple happen to stumble upon Relative Pitch during the course of the week). We are singing Rudsambee classic Take My Hand just before the bride comes in and had an interesting time trying to work out whether we have always sung it slightly wrongly or whether our poor memories were letting us down again. Suffice to say we had to think in triplets. Maestro Boy suggested that the piece had "that Envoi feeling" which left Robin, Mummy Elaine and myself with heads in hands (see previous blog posts as to the triplet difficulty level of Envoi - it is off the scale and generally involved us having to dance a salsa either literally or in our mind's eye). Take My Hand also contains the little used botanical term "fescue". Maestro Boy was unsure as to its meaning and the gardeners amongst us (most of us live in flats so expertise in this was severely limited) explained that it is a type of grass. Cue Maestro Boy, "it sounds horrid". Festering fescue perhaps?
To add further excitement, the previously used dynamics for this piece are as subjective and vague as I have ever heard - "warm and light", "warm" (no idea where the lightness went for verse two), "strong and hard" (that's verse 3 when the daily grind starts to get to the happy couple - bit of encouragement to the wedded duo there) etc etc. Whatever happened to p and mf? However, we muddled through and put in some jolly crescendos just for fun.
Anyways we cracked this one and moved of to Sfogava which I think will sound better when a) we are able to sing the right notes in the right order, b) we maintain good tone throughout c) we sing it in an slightly more boisterous acoustic then we currently have at chez Wexler and d) we stop looking scared and gripping our copies so tightly. Plenty of time to perfect it folks - all of three weeks. In all seriousness (no really) it is going to sound brillig when we've cracked it.
So what are we wearing to Douglas' daughter's wedding you may ask? Of course uniform in Rudsambee has in the past been a topic of discussion akin to the development of world peace or the ending of poverty. It was decided very quickly (after a brief jape about wearing full wedding outfits - big hats, tails... a white dress!) to wear our usual red and black. The gentlemen took their shirts away tonight with Robin's suggestion that an "implicit iron" comes with them. Not sure what an implicit iron looks like, but hopefully all the gentlemen will arrive looking suitably pressed. With great power comes great responsibility lads.
Talking of lads, Robin's final comment of the night was the pertinent question "Where do men hang out?" An interesting query though he was of course asking because we are still on the look out for some tenors and basses to join us, but you never know with Robin...
All the joys of the summer season to you all
CSW
PS for all cat-lovers out here, another piece of entertainment shared by Mr Whitacre (although not by him):
No comments:
Post a Comment