Making up for lost blogs...

How efficient is this? Go me!

We had some people missing last night due to the snow. SNOW? AGAIN?? What’s that all about, then? And then today the sun was shining really very warmly when I left home and I was quite hot when I got into town but at 4.30, the sun still shining, it was HAILING in Marchmont. I am confused. And obviously far too English if I am discussing the weather.

Anyway, the numbers were better than last week which, considering the imminence of the next concert, was something of a relief. We even had new dad Angus there, who has been rather tied to home recently with the advent of young Maxwell. It was great to have him back and looking remarkably well-rested considering. But I think I heard him say that the baby wakes up twice a night; is this possible? Only twice? What happened to every hour on the hour like my own little darlings? No wonder he looks OK: 'e don't know 'e's born. (Ha). We gave him (for Max, of course) a musical caterpillar (oh, he will bless us for that in a few months time!).

We spent a long time trying to memorise one of the Armenian songs which was harder work than it should have been – for everyone except the basses who don’t sing it so had nothing to do (but wonder at the slowness of others, I suppose). Somehow those words just wouldn’t sink in. There aren’t even that many of them; they’re just sort of almost the same but not quite in places which is very confusing. I’m sure we’ll get there eventually. Sadly, I thought I had before we started rehearsing – then I realised all the work (ahem...) I’d done during the week had been for nought. Ah, well! C’est la vie.

Which brings me neatly to:

The lovely Debussy, Dieu! Qu’il la fait bon regarder (see what that’s done to my computer – there’s green and red squiggles all over the place) is back on the programme so we had to do a fair bit of work on that, though it was pretty well-remembered on the whole. Luke has never sung it before so it was only reasonable to give him a chance to learn it and a refresher course is never wasted on the rest of us. Inevitably there was discussion as to French pronunciation – a perennial favourite with the linguists (and those who think they are) amongst us. We will never all agree. Just as we all speak English with a marvellous variety of accents and vowel sounds we will always have problems coming to a consensus on the proper way to speak (sing) French [or other languages, for that matter] which is, after all, not the first language of any of us. Trouble is, enough of us have made a fist of learning it in the past and think we know what we're talking about (in theory, anyway, even if we can’t quite put it into practice!) whereas give us Armenian or Gaelic or Norwegian and we haven’t a clue so we can’t argue [although we usually do]. What larks, as our former Blogstress might have said.

Another stab at By Falsehood and, by George I think she’s got it! Well, very nearly. Concentration is the answer. A bit of counting helps but we’re not supposed to do too much of that, apparently. We have to listen to the sopranos and go with them. That’s all right then. Sorted.

Happy Easter, Everyone. May you eat much chocolate but not be sick. Adieu.