Requiem for a concert

Phew. It's taken me three days to recover enough from our local music festival to write about it. We ended the festival with a performance of the Brahms Requiem in a transcription he did himself for piano duet -- we used two pianos, as we hadn't been sure which it was meant to be and the hire charges turned out to be almost the same. It should have been one -- or was at the first performance in 1871 (done because the venue wasn't big enough for an orchestra) -- but the editor of the score had made suggestions for extra octaves if you had the luxury of two.

I left choosing an outfit till an hour before the start time so as to have something to panic about other than my solo. I'm back to how overweight I was before I got pregnant, which is as much as I've ever been. As I buy all my clothes second hand and aren't too bothered about a snug fit, I generally have a range of sizes, and so it proved. A quite liked the look of the one I had to pour myself into, but my mother pointed out that the zip was straining and sanity prevailed. Sequins have amazingly little give, you know. I didn't want anything hampering my lung capacity -- that opening phrase demands every ounce of oxygen if you're not to snatch a breath in the middle (it's a sublime tune, 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit'). Anyway, it was all worth it, because I Did It In One. I was really quite pleased, as I didn't even always manage it in rehearsal. What with thinking about breathing, mood, a wide domey shape in my mouth (Berty speak), relaxing my tongue and not sticking my chin out, I fear that once again singing it in tune may have been pushed out by lack of memory capacity, but the people I asked who I expected to be candid said it hadn't been flat. In a week or so, when the buzz has worn off, we'll listen to the recording. I'm still not sure I woulnd't rather have the warm cosy glow of a memory happily distorted by the adrenalin rush, though.

An excellent group of singers, too: it's so lovely to listen to the exposed entries and not cringe. One needs all those choral society memories of fuzzy basses, histrionic tenors, wispy altos and strangled sopranos in order to appreciate really good singers. We did it with thirteen -- three to a part, plus an extra soprano to spare my blood pressure. They really were rather fabulous.

What can we do next year, though? Does anyone know of any good stuff that can legitimately be sung with piano or two-piano accompaniment, or have we exhausted that category? (We've done the Rossini Petite Messe Solenelle (piano and harmonium) and Carmina Burana (two pianos and percussion).) I guess we'll have to start thinking about a small orchestra, whether modern or baroque. Oh lord, it's going to be hell to organise. Ah. And there is one other requirement: if I'm going to fix the thing, it would be nice if it had a soprano solo. Wouldn't it? (Sniff.)

Oh, bloody hell

Oh lord, I so hate fixing concerts. Well.... certainly at this point of maximum stress when you get to the end of your list and you still haven't got enough singers and the date is getting closer and closer and you send out increasingly desperate emails to increasingly distantly known people and some of them still just don't answer at all and and and. It must be grim to do it professionally, where you do all the organising and don't even get to perform -- which at least you do, when you're an amateur, and fixing things you can sing in yourself. At which point it does at last seem worthwhile. Thank goodness.

Professional music really does sound like a dog's life a lot of the time. Well, I suppose in essence the perks aren't much better than those you get as an amateur, and the cons are very large cons -- the endless travelling, the constant pressure, the scrimped rehearsal time, the uncertainty... Yuck. Anyway. One of our tenors -- and we only have three, because of only having three each of everything -- has gone down with this week's nasty throat bug. What a bugger. Actually, it's probably worse for him: when you look forward to these things for ages, it often turns out that you get six months in peachy health and then some disgusting lurgy strikes just as throat-related fun was on the horizon. Yah, and boo, and sucks.

I've got behind with my book listings: it's actually quite hard work to write down everything I read. If I simply zap through a children's book in an hour or so, I don't mention it here, but I suppose, actually, a reading diary would be illuminating as a food diary if I didn't mind finding out what an addict I am. I'm currently reading a book online, which is wretchedly inconvenient: it's by the unwieldily named Lois McMaster Bujold, who seems to be recommended by most of the other people on the couple of mailing lists I'm on. Going well so far, but I'll post when I'm done. A couple of weeks ago I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which had some fancy reviews. It's essentially a fairly stream-of-consciousness account of how she felt when her long-term partner died suddenly of a heart attack (this is on the cover blurb and therefore Doesn't Count as a spoiler). It was honest and candid and all that, but not, to be brutal, terribly interesting. Maybe I don't bottle up my own feelings enough to admire someone else for unbottling theirs. The fact that struck me most -- callow youth that I am -- was that she'd named her daughter 'Quintana'.

I've just reread Scoop for the umpteenth time, having recommended it to our reading group. It's one of the funniest books I know, and doesn't pall with re-reading. Amazingly, the satire has dated very little. It has a lot more heart than earlier works of Waugh's such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, I think: Boot's relationship with -- have I got this right? -- Katryn is really rather poignant. But the sheer number of things the novel takes digs at is really pretty remarkable. It's in my list of my top ten books, which admittedly has never managed to shrink below fifteen and currently stands at twenty or so, but there you are. If you want to give Waugh a try, I'd also recommend A Handful of Dust, which has the distinction of being both very funny and one of the saddest stories I know (I'm deliberately quoting from Ford Madox Brown's The Good Soldier, which touts inself as 'the saddest story I know' and rather overplays its hand, I thought -- it's rather fusty, and never worked at all for me.).

I can't remember whether I said: we solved the last-minute alto crisis by going back to the top of the list and starting again. Genius. That was A's suggestion, of course: I was in too much of a flap to think straight. What's especially unhelpful, you know, is that it's never the same voice part twice. I've had a soprano crisis, an alto crisis, a tenor crisis and a bass crisis, at different times. Aaaargh. Imagine fixing a whole orchestra. (No, actually, I can't. Or mustn't. It makes me hyperventilate.)