wee dug by Joe Davie

David McGuinness's blog (2000-2018)

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Monday 20 November 2000

I've been reading the text of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd as preparation for seeing Brian McMaster (director of the Edinburgh Festival) tomorrow. There's just a chance he might be talked into letting us do it in some form next year, but he's not wild about it as a piece. As far as I can make out, the last professional production was at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949.

Still, things are looking up for a possible visit to Rome in March, sharing a bill with the folk band Old Blind Dogs, courtesy of the British Council. If it comes off, I hope we can persuade OBD's singer Jim Malcolm to do a number or two with us as well - last summer we did Auld Lang Syne together, to the old tune, for a live radio broadcast for the opening of the Scottish Parliament.

I've been editing the tango album for Mr McFall's Chamber this past week - I set up all the gear at one end of our kitchen, which on the face of it is a funny place to edit a record, but it feels very civilised. The company of inquisitive children and the smell of cooking are far preferable to the confines of a commercial studio. I'm working on headphones quite a lot though, as the strains of Astor Piazzolla, heard only in repeated three-second bursts, were driving everyone in the house insane.

Calum Malcolm did the remixes from the multitrack tapes at his house last Wednesday, and he mentioned that Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout had written a record's worth of orchestral music on his computer - would I be interested in sorting out the scores for him?  So in the next week or so I'm expecting a demo CD and a disk of the MIDI files, to see what I make of it. Prefab Sprout were certainly a cut above your average 80s band, so it could turn out to be very interesting ...

This week I'm playing in the SCO, directed by the violinist Thomas Zehetmair.  I heard his string quartet on the radio when they were in Edinburgh last summer, and they sounded quite superb - one sign of their musical commitment is that they play everything from memory, which is quite rare for quartets. Alison McGillivray plays in a baroque group, Ricordo, that does the same. All I'm doing this week is playing harpsichord in a Haydn symphony, which isn't exactly high profile, but it's always enlightening watching a really good musician rehearse. The SCO are good company too. Ursula Leveaux gave me a lift to the station after the rehearsal - she's just come back from Japan, playing with Katherine McGillivray in Jiggy Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage. This should be a cue for lots of scurrilous JEG stories, but no, this is not the place ...