Friday 26 January 2001

This week's gone past in a bit of a blur. My daughter Susie was ill at the beginning of the week, so I ended up working at night instead of during the day, and since then I've been fitting in lots of little jobs and phone calls in amongst playing in the SCO.  I have a grand total of 24 bars to play in Arvo Pärt's Concerto Piccolo on BACH, which isn't exactly taxing, but it's meant a lot of sitting on trains, and a lot of hanging around backstage, which I've been putting to good use. Didn't Charlie Watts say that his first 25 years with the Rolling Stones were 5 years of playing and 20 of hanging around?

Had a very interesting meeting today with Tom Laurie about the possibility of us having some regular concerts in Glasgow again, at St Andrews in the Square where we made our first record.  We haven't played much in Glasgow since 1999, and it would be great to build up our home audience.  St Andrews is pretty much the only venue in the city suited to what we do in terms of acoustic, size, period and attitude (vital, this last one) so I hope it comes off.

Meanwhile, back in the SCO, the Arvo Pärt is a strange piece, written in the early 70s (I think) with the solo trumpet part added 25 years later. It's not totally convincing, but one problem with Pärt's music is that he usually doesn't tell you on the page what he wants: you have to find someone who's worked with him to find out how it's supposed to go. Thankfully the soloist Håkan Hardenberger was able to tell us that the weird bits in the Sarabande should sound smeared, like a portrait of Bach by Francis Bacon. What a great image. 

I remember playing prepared piano in Pärt's Tabula Rasa a few years ago, and the part was full of comments and annotations from a previous player along the lines of 'what the composer actually preferred at this point was ...' and the date. It was great fun going into a variety of concert halls and proceeding to wreck their best pianos by stuffing bolts between the strings, although I remember also spending quite a lot of time in ironmongers' shops that week trying to get just the right size of bolt.

Incidentally, the Harp Consort gig from my previous diary entry is broadcast on Wednesday 31st, 1300 GMT at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 and Hille Perl's own site is www.hillenet.net - complete with pictures of her Italian viol, and herself of course.  I'd give you a link for the Harp Consort, but they specifically said to me 'Don't go there, we're having it reworked!'

Just before going to bed on Tuesday I sat down at the piano and wrote a spoof soap theme, which I've been asked to provide for a Glasgow City Council video. It can't have taken me much more than a couple of minutes to write it. The irony is it'll take at least a whole day in the studio to record the thing.