Friday 30 March 2001

I've spent a tiring but enjoyable day at St Cecilia's Hall in Edinburgh recording the two harpsichord pieces for the forthcoming CD. One of them is Domenico Corri's variations on Duncan Gray, which culminate in a Tambourin.  Corri was in Edinburgh for 14 years, and portraits of him and his family, gifted by his descendants, are hung in the entrance lobby to the hall, where he put on many concerts.  Corri was also the Scottish agent for Broadwood pianos and harpsichords, and I was playing on the last known harpsichord by John Broadwood, an amazing instrument from 1793 with a machine stop and a Venetian swell.  As if that weren't  enough, I did some background reading for The Gentle Shepherd on the train from Glasgow, and then the 5 minute walk from Waverley station to St Cecilia's took me past the sites of Allan Ramsay's theatre and of his original bookshop.  Edinburgh's like that I suppose, its past is never far away.

Anyway, the Broadwood was great fun. Normally it's considered a bit infra dig to play around with the registration on the harpsichord, but playing music from the 1780s on an instrument with a lute stop, a harp stop, a swell, and a machine pedal, is just asking for it, so I spent the morning working out how to use as many combinations and gadgets as possible.  I then spent a lot of the afternoon session pushing the wrong knobs and pressing the wrong pedals, which serves me right, but there was the opportunity to include some great clunking noises as various bits of mechanism engaged and disengaged. Again this is something that your humble harpsichordist is normally very embarrassed about, but this instrument has great big brass knobs that make satisfying noises so I've unashamedly kept them in.

It's strange recording music that doesn't usually get played at all, as there's no 'performing tradition' to fit into, or rail against. I asked Ursula Leveaux to come along and lend her ears for a while, to check that my playing wasn't incomprehensible, and she made some very useful observations which I hope I managed to act upon. She was also very keen that the mechanism noises stay in, which was reassuring.

St Cecilia's isn't the quietest hall in the world - the glass cupola tends to amplify the sound of passing lorries - but Calum didn't seem too worried by this. I was reading recently in Jake Heringman's diary at  www.disciplineglobalmobile.com about the problems he had making a lute recording in York recently, with days wasted while the sounds of the traffic outside leaked in. Maybe I've just been reading too much John Cage recently, but when listening to old records of church music from the 60s and 70s, the fact that you can hear the traffic going past has never really bothered me. Someone told me that you can hear a phone ringing at one point in Jacqueline du Pre's famous record of the Elgar cello concerto. A harpsichord is a bit louder than a lute, but I suppose the real problem with extraneous noises is that you can't do so many edits - the background noises suddenly disappear and your cover is blown!