Sunday 21 April 2002

Belfast City Airport again: waiting to take off this time, looking out at the rain on the tarmac. Possibly the best thing about this place is the complete absence of muzak - long may that civilised state of affairs continue. This afternoon's gig was pretty good fun: Ade played a storming Vivaldi fiddle sonata, and Mhairi sang Handel's early Laudate Pueri, which is the kind of piece where you think 'he's going to turn out to be a very good composer one day': big ambitious ideas not quite brought off. It's quite a sing though, an awful lot of notes. In the Ut collocet, I momentarily forgot what key I was in and improvised merrily in B flat when everyone else was in G minor - you can hear the result on Radio 3 on 8 May at 1300 BST. Rehearsals were a great laugh: theorbo player Eligio Quintiera, who's about to do some playing on the next Kate Bush album on a song where she plays clavichord, takes delight in wild stylistic incongruities whenever the rehearsal breaks down, so that Vivaldi had a habit of degenerating into 70s funk from the two of us without warning. I knew things were looking up when in the first break he sat down at the organ and played Michael Jackson's Thriller.