Friday 3 December 2004

First things first. The Red Red Rose CD is now available - and very red it is too. Check out the audio samples on our CD page.  I listened to it in the car yesterday and was delighted to see CD-Text track titles appear - wasn't expecting that. My favourite track at the moment is probably Old Sir Symon the King, thanks to DG's amazing heavy metal fiddling and the rest of us trying very hard to follow him. That and our flagrant disregard for the printed bassline. And Auld Robin Gray is a very sad song when you're not actually playing it. There's a full track listing at the Delphian Records site - click on 'shop' and you'll find it.

Tomorrow on BBC Radio 3 my Between the Ears programme 'Don't Wear a Hat' gets an airing at 9.50pm GMT. If you miss it, it will be available on the 'listen again' part of the website for a week afterwards. Greg plays the two lowest strings on the violin, and I play the white notes of the piano and talk to the residents of two Glasgow care homes about this and that. And there's a hysterically funny rendition of I Belong to Glasgow sung in a thick French accent and played in 3 and 4 in a bar simultaneously. Amongst other things.

On Wednesday I went off to Nenthorn to borrow Tony Kime's SADiE editing system, and by the end of the morning we'd tempted Tony out of retirement for a day to record us at the school on 11 February, with a concert afterwards. Excellent.

The following morning I went into the RSAMD to hear Alison's lecture on playing basslines - I'm lecturing there next week, so thought I'd better find out what they know already. She started by saying that continuo playing was all about harmony, which made me laugh because I start my lecture from a keyboard player's perspective by saying that it's all about rhythm. So between the two of us I think we cover the important bases (I'll resist the weak pun available here). As I left, Lisa Milne rang about a really quite bizarre concert opportunity in April 2006; I won't say any more here about that yet.  

On the drive to Nenthorn I was listening to a compilation CD put together by Radio 3's Early Music Show which included some of the best Bach playing I've heard in ages: the group was Café Zimmerman playing Brandenburg 5, a piece which I had pretty much lost interest in, having heard it murdered so many times. When hearing a piece you know well, it's very good to hear yourself responding with 'yeah, that's how it goes' rather than wincing.