Saturday 23 February 2002

I'm stuck in Stansted airport with a three hour delay to my flight home after an afternoon concert with Katherine McGillivray in Harlow ("Harlow - gateway to, um, Essex"). I just checked my email to pass the time, and there was a message from Chris Norman asking about a date in Vancouver in October. Fine, as long as it doesn't involve hanging around noisy airports, but I suppose you can't predict these things.

Katherine had to dash for a flight to Amsterdam to get to a rehearsal tomorrow morning, so we had a car waiting for us at the end of the concert.  I got changed out of my concert gear and packed my bag in the back of the speeding car (and without even taking my seatbelt off - I wonder what passing motorists made of this). Katherine caught her flight with minutes to spare, but mine to Glasgow is 3 hours late. Now, when you've just come off stage, a bit tired, and not wound down yet, a noisy airport is not a nice place to be. Every single eating place, and every shop is playing awful muzak very efficiently - I even asked the waiter at Garfunkel's (which seemed the least noisy) to find me a relatively quiet seat away from a speaker, but he looked at me as though I was completely mad, so I left.  I didn't want to be bombarded with pseudo-plastic funk that's had all the bass rolled off, I just wanted somewhere to sit down and a pizza. 

The only time I've ever flown first class, the most worthwhile part of the whole experience was the passenger lounge - it was Virgin at Heathrow, which has a music room and a library and is a haven of rest. Out in steerage class, being bombarded by endless varieties of ambient noise when your blood sugar is low, your adrenaline is high, and you've just been told you're not going to get to go home for another three hours, is not much fun. Still, I eventually found a quietish corner of concourse, got a tea and some carry-out sushi and now I feel a bit human again. On the flight south yesterday I was reading a book by a person with Asperger's Syndrome, about the experiences of sensory bombardment and the anxiety that results: sometimes when I'm tired and hungry I can imagine something of what it must be like. But then I can have a cup of tea and a sit down, and feel better.

The concert had its moments, but we never got to rehearse in the hall, except for five minutes as the audience came in. I've learned not to waste time and energy getting angry in these situations, but the truth is you're not going to give of your best without adequate preparation - winging it is all very well and quite fun in itself, but the chances are something will not go as well as it could. In today's case, the last movement of the Hindemith was a trifle, well, approximate to say the least. If we'd had a chance to work on the balance beforehand so that it wasn't at the forefront of our minds, we might have played all the right notes in the right order.  

One of the things about being a keyboard player who sometimes takes an 'accompanist' role is that you get used to the practice of quick adjustment.  If your star soloist has a memory lapse, and skips a beat or a bar, you can jump almost instantaneously with them, and few people in the audience will notice.  I was listening to a radio broadcast not long ago in which I'd done just this in some Haydn, and I didn't even notice!  In a duo with as sensitive a musician as Katherine McG, what can happen (and did several times in the concluding section of the Hindemith) is that if one of you slips, you both adjust simultaneously to the error and thus perpetuate it. At one point - it was all rushing past so quickly that I'm not sure where - I think I skipped half a bar, and had just figured out how to put it back in, when Katherine skipped a corresponding half bar for me.  So we ended up staying out of sync for even longer.  This happened at least another twice in the closing two pages of the piece, and the honest thing to do would have been to stop, laugh, and say 'OK, this time we'll get it right'.  But we had planes to catch ...

Earlier this week I had a very nice time (wearing my BBC hat) with the Ensemble Ambrosius. To hear baroque instruments playing a range of music from jazz and Frank Zappa to abstract sound sculpture was very refreshing.  Multi-instrumentalist Jonte Knif told me about the electric clavichord he's just had built: it has a very small compass, but you can play guitar solos on it, complete with feedback. There's something wonderfully perverse about combining the technology of the 15th century with that of the 1970s, but I think it shows that Finns have a healthy attitude towards cultural history. After the gig Robert McFall joined us in the bar, and he and Olli Virtaperko swapped stories of their very different experiences of dealing with Gail Zappa: nothing I can repeat here, but very entertaining.

I've still got two hours to kill in this soulless airport - what I'd like is a nice warm bath ...