OMG!

What the…?  I arrived in good time last night and, what did I see?  I’ll tell you what I saw.  Through the dining-room window I espied a group of men….several basses and a smattering of tenors.   In full voice.  It seems they had all arrived

EARLY?

And were practising – I say it again because it is almost beyond belief and the more I say it the more I might believe it – 

EARLY.

By arrangement, as it turned out.  I find this a little scary.  Why?  Not sure, exactly.  Men of the super-keen variety are not unheard of within our ranks but to get nearly all of them there

EARLY

is, I think, unprecedented and, yes, a little scary.  Hypnotism?  Bribery?  Threats?  Something fishy’s going on and I’m not sure I like it!

We women arrived in dribs and drabs, as is usually the case with everyone and all of us looked slightly nonplussed.  More than one person asked “What is going on?”  Susan offered the explanation that the men’s…um…previousness (?!) was by mutual agreement.  This did nothing to dispel the confusion.

Once we had all gathered and been joined by the ‘men’-who-have-been-swapped-by-aliens we began with a warm-up orchestrated by Jenny who did a much better job of it than I did in Week One.  I think people actually felt warmed-up by the time she’d finished with us.  Ollie then told us what we’d be doing for the rest of the evening and, indeed, we did do most of it but, unfortunately, there was no time to have a second look at Nikos’s piece and I was looking forward (with only a teensy amount of dread) to that.

We went over the two French pieces which we began last week – the Lully  Entrées de Ballet.  I had my glasses with me this week and a clear head so these went much better for me.  They are not difficult, or not in the alto line, anyway.  We have had to change the rhythm in a few bars as the notation was different from the original and Ol wants it the same, we worked on tuning and expression.  The basses have ten bars or so to sing at the beginning of the 3^rd Entrée (why has my computer added an accent on this word for me and not on the first ‘Entrées’ above (and again)?  Is it the ‘s’ that confuses?  No, look, I added an ‘s’ and it’s still there.  I think it’s the Lully; how odd [here, have an accent]) and they tried, bless them.  Perhaps they should arrive early next week to practise this.  They sang it (?) and it wasn’t good.  In fact, “That was shit,” said Kay, never one to mince her words.  It was.  But it was better when we came back to it later.  And when we came back to these later and still hadn’t got the chordage quite precise enough Ollie told us he wanted no wet tea-bags, no splatting.  “Perhaps a cafettiere instead,” suggested Robin; though it’s hard to see how that would work.

We spent some time on the beautiful Abendlied, which is not yet beautiful, I’m afraid, but has potential.  I felt some triumph in finding a couple of bars quite straightforward which our Jen was finding tricky.  HA!  I practised on my own at home before leaving for rehearsal.  It is a few bars later where the Eb that was causing Mrs Fardell a problem reverts to an E natural that was tripping me up (in spite of personal practise) but I managed to find the pesky note every time after some trilling around and about it and it will come naturally (tee hee) soon enough.

We separated into two groups for the men to practise (again) their new piece and for we women to try and make some progress with the Bulgarian song we started last week.  Make progress we did, especially after throwing the men out of the piano-holding room but then we discovered that our two sheets of music, coming along rather nicely by this time, should have been considerably more in number, the first page ending with bar 12 and the second starting with bar 61.  Oops.  Quite a lot missing, then.  “Perhaps we won’t practise linking them up just yet,” says the puzzled BW, “Someone emailed me this and told me there were only 2 pages.”  Someone was mistaken, were they not?  I don’t suppose anyone but a Bulgarian or two would notice if we were only singing a third of the words; it seems from the translation we have that those few we are singing would make some sort of sense alone but the men’s piece is much longer than ours so I think an effort should be made to find the missing section as quickly as possible.  Can’t have them hogging the limelight (even if they are prepared to turn up 

EARLY).

We female types were treated to a performance of Zikr (think that’s correct – Christopher?? [yep]) and what fun it was.  The basses were in full flow and the tenors looking terrified and confused by turns but they did OK.  Very OK.  It is a great piece and will sound fantastic once they all know what they’re doing (one can dream…)

Heather has come up with a good plan – she thinks maybe we should consider making a new CD before Ollie leaves us; either instead of or as well as a concert in May.  I like this idea, though we have no Helen to do the recording.  I’m sure someone could be found to help out. There’re bound to be a few things we want to set down from Ollie’s tenure and I think we’ll kick ourselves if we don’t do it.  May is looking a bit dodgy for me in terms of being around at weekends so I hope a decision is made soon about dates and doings so that I can order my life accordingly and not miss out on any Rudsambee-related excitement.

There you are.  Up-to-date if not enthralled.

xxx