Sunday 12 October 2003

on the plane to Brussels

I've come to the end of my week playing in the SCO, the highlight of which was standing with a fine fish supper watching the moon rise over the water, on a beautiful calm night in St Andrews on Friday. I drove back from there with a car full of violinists listening to a CD I've compiled to amuse my kids on boring journeys: Bonzo Dog Band, Madness, Ivor Cutler, with the odd Hanna-Barbera theme tune and Beatles song thrown in. By the time we got to Glasgow everyone felt like they'd been at a party. When the CD ran out I bravely put SADN on instead, and the party atmosphere prevailed. That's a relief - quite a few fiddle players in the orchestra bought copies too. It should at last be available in our online shop by the end of this week.

After the buzz of playing the Saint-Saëns last weekend, playing the organ in Dvorak's Mass in D was a completely adrenaline-free experience: it's not the greatest piece in the world by any reckoning. But it was interesting to find out if I could still negotiate a swell pedal without tying my feet in knots (just about). Last night I was playing an electronic simulacrum of a church organ in Edinburgh's Queens Hall: it didn't sound too bad, but the most fun bit was wiggling the crescendo pedal in time with the loud bits when I wasn't playing, as it made all the stops light up in sequence like a fruit machine. Hope the audience didn't notice.

On the way home after more fine Deuchars IPA, Greg told an excellent story about a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons some years ago starring an ex-colleague of ours, which performance unexpectedly involved a pair of knickers, a safety pin and a luminous condom. Fill in the details yourself.