Monday 5 December 2005

I've had a day off now, so it's back to my desk and the admin resulting from Saturday. But first, some backtracking.

We made it onto the stage of Perth Concert Hall for our 12.30 concert, after the following and much more: DG breaking lots of E strings, keyboard instruments not showing up on time, blocked toilets in the dressing rooms, a great picnic lunch from heart buchanan on Friday, an excellent joke-sharing session just before the concert in case DG's string went on stage (none of the jokes were suitable for a concert hall audience though), various snatched business meetings with Andrew Logan in church vestries, station cafes and crowded train carriages, and the observation from John Butt that the rising augmented 4th at the beginning of the last movement of BWV170 is supposed to make you feel sick.

 we say 'moo' on the way back to the station in Perth

Anyway, Perth concert hall is great and the staff are terrific. Having a regular gig there is going to be very good indeed.

But my favourite bit of the whole experience was when I left the stage and listened to everyone else playing the middle section of the cantata rather beautifully. There's a lesson there: either play or organise, don't do both. I was so exhausted by the time of the concert that I was freaked out by the presence of the BBC's microphones for the first time ever: they were very close and the audience seemed quite far away. So I don't think I breathed properly until halfway through the cantata, when the end of the concert was in sight. I relaxed briefly in James's concerto, but everything else was anxiety-driven. Fortunately DG was on great form in our sonata, as all I could think about was not playing wrong notes (with the inevitable result that I started playing some). Ugh.

Still, at long last I managed a quick conversation about the John Passion with a very enthusiastic Mark Padmore afterwards - he was about to sing Winterreise on the stage a couple of hours later.

The other result of organising and playing simlutaneously is that I start losing things. My precious hat (from Tracy Thomson at Kabuki in New Orleans) is now missing, so I hope some kind soul in Perth picked it up from the dressing room. I lost my previous favourite hat at the end of the sessions for Colin's Kisses in 1998, and a favourite fleece went missing for a year after the sessions for The Red Red Rose in 2002 ... I don't normally lose things at all.