Saturday 13 January 2007

on the road to Aberdeen, just passing the NCR factory where the workforce got sacked the other day

It's pouring rain, Alison Green's driving, and I'm catching up on emails in the passenger seat.  I've been gradually feeling less ill this week, although I still had to try to suppress a coughing fit in a really quiet moment of last night's concert. I'll take some water on stage tonight.

The SCO is full of very nice people, so I've been weathering the shock of being in an orchestra quite well. Sandrine Piau is a wonderful singer, bonkers in a very intelligent way, and John Butt kindly sorted out by email a query we had about the rather curious slurring in the opening of Bach's cantata no.42. Never again will I trust the old Bach Gesellschaft edition without checking first - in this case almost none of the copious articulation is original.

Thursday was my least favourite day this week: it's as well that the music and the company were good. A courier pickup and a courier delivery both failed for different reasons, and my phone's SIM card spontaneously self-destructed, so any text messages sent to me for the last couple of days haven't got to me yet.

I spent a lot of time trying to get through to so-called helplines on borrowed phones. And I haven't fixed my puncture yet.

But this morning (my only free time) was looking up. Emmanuelle gave me her recent Handel recording with Natalie Dessay which is real music, unlike almost every other Handel CD I've heard recently. Are all the good early music groups French now? I've enthused here about Café Zimmermann before. And Joe paid a visit bringing the artwork for the Lion CD which includes his simple paintings of some of the preliminary pencil sketches that were too good to waste. I think this one might get adopted as our logo ...

1am
Home again, strangely relieved at having had a good experience in classical/orchestral music. It doesn't happen to me very often.