Wednesday 20 August 2003

The Edinburgh Festival continues apace. It's the performance of Poro tonight, so I've had a long-awaited morning off and a trip to the gym in preparation for the gruelling mental strain ahead.  Rehearsals have been both inspiring and frustrating: inspiring because Emmanuelle Haïm's command of the piece is absolutely stunning, but frustrating because she doesn't always manage to communicate it clearly and in simple terms to the rest of us mortals.  So the general rehearsal yesterday was pretty chaotic, with a lot of sore necks afterwards from the stress (mine included). I wonder how tonight will go.

But there have been some great moments along the way. Saturday morning's recitative rehearsal was over-running badly, so at the scheduled finish time, some of the players had to leave to get to their next rehearsal.  Then the organ was taken away, leaving me with just a harpsichord. Next, that went too, so Emmanuelle and I shared the other one. And then there were no keyboard instruments at all, and we all sat around Yair Avador's lute instead. A kind of farewell symphony.

I've managed to hear a few things: the SCO's Brahms Symphonies with Mackerras were fantastic, and much better than their rather drab-sounding CDs of the same, recorded in the same hall a few years ago. Sir Charles was going to come to the Poro run on his day off yesterday, but as he said, 'Much as I'm devoted to Handel, to Emmanuelle and to you, I think I need my day off'. I was suitably flattered. 

On Monday night there were some great unintentionally amusing moments in the Paragon Ensemble concert of new Japanese music. At one point it took four and a half minutes to set out the chairs for six players. This involved several people coming and going on the stage, setting and re-setting chairs, tripping over music stands, even pushing one another out of the way - it was like watching Laurel and Hardy at work.  And then the musicians finally came on and shifted all the chairs again themselves anyway. Stagecraft is not dead, it's just not feeling very well.

You might think that all of this high art induces noble thoughts in its participants, but of course that's not the case at all. I've now been introduced to various unbroadcastable lyrics to fit the themes in Brahms's symphonies, and I've learnt from a colleague that the infallible way to distinguish between sacred and secular music, is that if you can sing the phrase 'stick it up your [rhymes with 'lighter']' to it, it's sacred music.