Friday 27 April 2001

Very tired after a busy week, editing the text of the Gentle Shepherd on trains while travelling to SCO rehearsals and concerts.  The concerts went very well in the end, although I made a spectacular cock-up tonight in the Rameau.  The 'bruit de guerre' movement from Dardanus is really wild, and just as we were about to start, someone in the audience's mobile phone went off.  So the 'bruit' was quite spirited in response - I was figuring out ways to hit the keys sideways to make them rattle, playing great handfuls of splashy chords, that sort of thing.  And it was just starting to get a little out of control, so I was thinking about how to rein it back in when ... I completely forgot about the crucial unexpected bar's rest half way through the movement.  Cue a very spirited but utterly wrong two-note harpsichord solo, completely wrecking the dramatic entry from the bassoons due one beat later.  They were sitting behind me so I couldn't even look over apologetically at them until the end, when to my relief they fell about laughing.  Well, experiences like this are supposed to build musical maturity - fat chance in my case. 

It was a joy to listen to Ursula Leveaux play the Vivaldi D minor bassoon concerto three nights running, if rather humbling to know someone who can take something commonplace and make it so uncommonly beautiful - she can say more in two notes than I ever will in a lifetime.  And on the bassoon.  

I had dinner with Robert McFall and Ursula Smith in Cafe Source, which is in the basement of St Andrews in the Square, and we went upstairs to look at the space itself. It really is perfect for what we do: an 18th century building with a fantastic acoustic, a centre for traditional music, and with a great bar and food underneath.  I'm meeting Tom Laurie next week to firm up our concert series there, so hopefully soon we will have three more dates in the diary for this year. I'd passed on the Robin Williamson stuff to Robert to see if he'd be interested in working on it, and sure enough, he's very keen (another future St Andrews in the Square project).  And I had an interesting conversation with a promoter in London this afternoon, about the increasing possibility of getting the Ensemble Ambrosius over from Finland to play their Frank Zappa arrangements for baroque instruments (yet another).

On Monday I'm off to Calum Malcolm's place to listen to him mix the session tapes for the new CD - I haven't listened to most of it for over a year now so it will be a bit of a voyage of discovery.  We recorded it all to multitrack as I wanted to mix the record like a pop album rather than a pure, unsullied, minimal microphone technique, classical thing.  On reflection it'll probably be somewhere in between.  Can't wait.