Monday 26 July 2010

Lunenburg  
I made it into Halifax on time to be ferried by DG and Chris down to Lunenburg for rehearsal, finishing at 3am UK time. Somehow the music seemed much easier the following morning…

I’m staying at David and Julie Robb’s place right in the middle of town, between the Academy where most of the teaching happens, and the church and halls where food gets eaten and concerts take place. Pretty idyllic, especially given that my hosts are endlessly hospitable and entertaining.

It rained for most of yesterday but I was too busy to take much notice, rehearsing with the rest of the vortex and Jean-Christophe Maillard and his musette de cour. Unusually for a Boxwood opening concert, we managed to rehearse in the time available and it was all relatively stress-free. The only pre-concert niggle was that I couldn’t tune the harpsichord as thoroughly as I would have liked, as the church was locked at the vital moment. Still, my tuning issues were nothing compared to Jean-Christophe’s as the punishing heat and humidity in the church played havoc with his drone reeds. Lots of running repairs in the course of the second half made the concert longer than we’d intended.  

And then today the sun came out and I gradually got myself into weekday Boxwood mode, planning the Gentle Shepherd performance for Friday, taking my first listening class of the week, singing spirituals with the Boxwood singers, giving a piano lesson, and discussing Moldovan Eurovision entries with Rod Garnett.  It’s going well I think.

At lunchtime in the park Edmund Brownless took me through his thorough analysis of the rhymes and vowel shifts in the Gentle Shepherd text. Usually, I’m the one in any group saying ‘Look, it doesn’t just “go like this”: the evidence suggests that it might go quite differently’, so it was a salutary experience to be the one thinking ‘but that’s not how it sounds’ when presented with historical evidence to the contrary.