Sunday 4 March 2007

Yesterday's concerts started spectacularly well with Alison's Bach cello suite, after which DG and I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with a rather nervy and brittle performance. Fortunately the Schetky quartet was fun. I hadn't slept much the previous night for quite unrelated reasons, and also my left middle finger seemed to have something lodged under its fingernail, so that every note I played with it was rather painful. I don't remember jamming anything in it. Katy volunteered one of her earrings to poke it with later in the day (and I was too confused to refuse), so if either her ear or my finger now becomes horribly infected, one of us can blame the other.

The ever-inventive technical staff at Perth had rigged us up an internal radio antenna and some cables, as the RF insulating properties of the hall's copper roof meant that our performance of Cage's Radio Music was otherwise going to be pretty much silent. Cage would no doubt have approved of such a quiet performance, but we didn't think it was going against the spirit of the piece to take some precautions to ensure that it could contain some sounds other than static, so part of our our afternoon rehearsal was spent experimenting with that. In the evening concert, lots of music seemed to happen - to my ears at any rate. I particularly enjoyed the Piazzolla, possibly because I wasn't playing in it much and could just sit and listen. Everyone on the stage did something exceptional at some point in the gig, so let's hear it for (from left to right) Katy Bircher, DG, Sarah Bevan-Baker, Carolyn Sparey (the other founder of the group back in '92!), Alison, Cecelia Bruggemeyer (back again at last) and Katharine Fuge. Heroes all.

Five of us got the train back to Glasgow, and cruelly decided to administer some gentle taunting to Andrew, who after setting everything in motion beautifully, had had to leave earlier in the day to look after another of his clients at a gig in Glasgow. We came up with 5 almost plausible imaginary crises, and simultaneously texted him for advice on each, ranging from the simple (DG: I got on the train to Aberdeen by mistake, what should I do?), to the paradoxical (Katy: I've lost my mobile - call me). By the time Andrew had switched his phone on and begun to deal with all of this, and then realised it was nonsense, DG and I were standing on my front step watching the lunar eclipse through binoculars, with bacon rolls and cups of tea.

This afternoon I was back at the concert hall in Perth again with Robbie to see and hear the London Sinfonietta play Benedict Mason's scores for three Chaplin films. I think Chaplin has finally now been rescued from his recent reputation as a sentimentalist, and Mason's scores were certainly inventive and fun, but to be honest, I think Chaplin was easily enough of a genius for his work to be worth watching with the music as he intended it, rather than trying to come up with some post-modern smartarse reworking. Similarly I'd rather hear Bach than Bach-Busoni, Bach-Liszt, or for that matter Bach-J.E.Gardiner.

On that note, the rehearsals for yesterday's concerts were very useful in crystallising in my head the idea that from now on we should always start rehearsing with a clean set of parts, free from pencil annotations. It was a running joke that I brought an eraser to rehearsals but not a pencil - it's standard orchestral practice to always have a pencil with you and to write yourself reminders of what and how to play into the part. But surviving 18th century parts rarely have any pencil marks in. So why do we need them now? Once you've written something in, it's a bit too easy just to follow your own written instructions, rather than continuing to respond to the sounds around you and then to make a musical decision, which might be the same one every time, and might not. I'd much rather respond to what Bach wrote rather than to something that I wrote.

A less philosophical problem arising from yesterday's concerts is that for three concerts in a row now I have been playing wrong notes. I thought I'd largely overcome this problem some years ago by systematically acquiring some keyboard technique, but to be dropping clangers in front of BBC microphones three times in a row isn't something I'm particularly happy about.