Bad head space this week so I am sorry but I haven’t got much to say for myself having been even less switched on than this week than I usually am. I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to write a comprehensible sentence... let’s see what I can do.
There was a new face in the alto section but, having arrived a little late, I missed introductions – I presume there were introductions? – I really apologise. I believe our new face belongs to a young lady of German nationality. In this I could be mistaken; there are other countries where German is spoken. I know Christopher will supply you with the necessary information [actually, he missed the intro as well!]. Soon he is going to show me how to post my own blogs and then you will never learn the truth about anything. Oh, lord! Anyway, said young lady seemed to be coping extremely well with copious amounts of sight-reading and so, if she stays, she will be a most welcome addition and I will still be by far the worst sight-reader in the choir.
So – new stuff again. Ollie’s idea is that we should spend a few weeks looking at new pieces and then select the ones we really like to work on alongside brushing up some older pieces for the Portrait Gallery concert.
We looked at two songs by Lully – from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: entrée de ballets 2 and 3. These are supposed to be fast and funny, if I remember rightly... I wasn’t feeling fast or funny but I got some of the notes right – eventually! We will have Nikos on guitar and Sebastian on cello when we sing these so will have to work on the balance but for now we were just note-bashing.
After this we split up into two groups, male and female. The women stayed in the sitting-room while the men went through to where the piano resides. As the BW stayed with us (most of the time) I have no idea who led the boys and I have no clue what they were working on [Arno mostly controlled the men through the first four pages of Zikr, which is another arrangement by Ethan Sperry whose Desh caused such amusement previously] but we female types were having a look at a piece called Dilmano Dilbero... a Bulgarian song with very tricky rhythms. A while ago we used this piece as a warm-up and Ollie had called me earlier in the day to ask if I still had a copy of the music. I couldn’t find it and as I searched I started to think that we’d never had the music but had been taught a bit of it off by heart and sung that bit over and over until warm... Ollie was, apparently, thinking the same thing but he managed to find the music before the rehearsal so we were able to start work on it. We got the hang of the first two bars without too much difficulty but after that everything went to hell and, in all the time we spent, we didn’t get beyond bar 5. However, we enjoyed ourselves getting nowhere. The men sounded very dramatic. I think they got further than we did with whatever they were working on but perhaps they were just singing bars 1 and 2 and giving it laldy to sound impressive.
When we got back together we had a look at a piece called Abendlied [after a few weeks of frantic email discussion to figure out where it had gone]. Sebastian has chosen this and it is lovely. Asked for a translation he manfully obliged until John offered, “It’s ‘Abide With Me’ in German, almost word for word.” Which it is. But the tune’s really pretty.
Chris fed me chocolate and gluten-free bickies to calm my shattered nerves (they began to mend) and that was it for the evening. Jenny drove me home.
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