Friday 23 March 2001

I was going to be recording the keyboard pieces tonight, but co-ordinating Calum's diary and John Raymond's babysitting has proved increasingly difficult!  John is now the assistant curator of the Russell Collection, but when I was a student, he had a harpsichord workshop at Otley Mill in Yorkshire. Even then his ears were legendary, not for their physical appearance, but their acuity. He could sit in the corner of a room full of musicians playing, and tune a harpsichord in a different pitch, in any temperament required, and still do it more accurately than many tuners could in complete silence.

The score of the Stamitz flute concerto for Melrose arrived today, so the only issue left to be resolved is whether the concert happens at all, given the foot and mouth outbreak. Melrose is in Border farming country, and there is a case 20 miles away (I think), so giving concerts and gathering an audience of farming folk may be out of the question. We'll have to wait and see.

The Edinburgh International Festival had its press launch yesterday, and I'm told The Gentle Shepherd was spoken of, so we can go public properly now and try to generate some media coverage. It's certainly nice to be in a festival brochure in such august company as Merce Cunningham. But I think that our extensive rehearsal period means that I won't have time to play in the SCO, which is a shame as they're doing a Handel concert with David Daniels and Rinaldo Alessandrini. 

I'm tidying the study today (clearing up correspondence mostly) while my computer is in for repair. The various upgrades I've done over the last few years have finally overloaded the motherboard, so it's time to start from scratch. There goes my weekend, loading all the software back on.

I was back in the recording studio on Monday, and while Stuart was working on his software conflicts and hardware glitches, I was messing around once more with the Strat and Pod. He expressed surpise that I hadn't gone out and bought one since the last session ('most people do'). The lovely thing about the Pod, is that it makes all the wonderful extraneous noises that electric guitar amplifiers make - buzzes, crackles, bangs, clicks. Having spent many years learning how to play the harpsichord as cleanly and noiselessly as possible, I now find that I'm putting some of the noises back in, lifting my fingers off the keys quickly so that the jacks bounce off the jack rail, hitting the case, or even stamping my feet. Once you've got the sounds under your technical control, why not?

2 CDs arrived in the post in the last couple of days - one from a promoter friend, wanting my opinion of the possibility of staging Robin Williamson's latest project, settings of the Psalms in Latin. I was pretty sceptical, but Robin's voice won me over completely. It's pretty rough at the edges, but there's a commitment to the way he sings: you can tell he really means it. If only more classical singers had that quality - it not something that gets taught very much at college.

And after a 4 month wait, amazon.com finally delivered me a copy of Capella Savaria's 2CD set of all the Muffat Concerti Grossi. The playing's a bit ropey, but what music!