Saturday 24 February 2001

My part-time job at the BBC threw up some interesting conversations this week. I was producing two live broadcasts: one was the clarinettist Michael Collins with the BT Scottish Ensemble, and the other was Colin Currie playing the new percussion concerto written for him and the RSNO by Michael Torke.

The BTs are mostly comprised of glamorous thin young women, and Michael Collins confessed to feeling like 'a big lump' when he stood in the middle of them to play the Finzi concerto in the first rehearsal. So he went and got his copy of the part, and hid behind a music stand from then on - a star soloist upstaged by the orchestra!

This is pretty much impossible to upstage Colin Currie - I went to along to a rehearsal of Michael Torke's piece on Thursday morning with our sound engineer, to suss the piece out.  Michael T was worried about the balance, as the wind really weren't cutting through the texture. 'It sounded fine on my MIDI setup at home,' he said.  I'm still not sure if this was a joke. The idea of a celebrated composer working out his orchestration just so that it sounded OK on his computer seemed a bit sacrilegious. Maybe it isn't really.

In amongst these, I fitted in a long visit to my accountant, during which I discovered I don't have accurate accounts for our Oswald CD (oops - another job for next week), and I'm starting to read through The Gentle Shepherd again, imagining our semi-staged version and making notes as I go. I'm trying not to get too excited about this until I have something 100% definite in writing saying that it really is happening, but I have a hunch that it will be a lot of fun. Jamie (who's going to play Patie) was on TV here in Scotland on Wednesday, to publicise the fact that he will be singing Harry Lauder songs at the Scottish Last Night of the Proms. He's such a shameless showman that I have a suspicion he will pull this off in some style.

My computer is behaving strangely - I opened it up tonight and discovered the CPU fan wasn't turning, so all technology-based endeavours will have to stop for a bit this week while I get it fixed.