Friday 24 February 2012

Sadly, our Ardkinglas concert next Friday has been postponed, so if you want to hear me wrestling with a fortepiano while Kathy sings Haydn and Schetky, you’ll have to come on Thursday. I managed to find half an hour to sit at the instrument concerned yesterday, a Walter copy by Paul McNulty: it’s wonderful, but compared to most pianos it’s completely unforgiving of sloppy playing, dodgy fingering and other ineptitude so I’m going to have do some more work in the next week. Still, it ups the chances of some interesting music coming out on the day.  In other fortepiano news, the very excellent Ronald Brautigam is inaugurating the university’s recently acquired 1844 Broadwood on Tuesday night, so I hope he won’t listen too hard to me practising next door earlier on.

I have an unusually busy week ahead: when I haven’t been on stage much for ages, suddenly having to hold lots of music in my head at once is quite a challenge. Tomorrow night Alasdair Roberts and Mairi Morrison are launching this album at the CCA and I’m going to sit in with the band for some of it, so today I’ve got to remind myself a) how the songs go, and b) what I played on the record.  It’s a great record though, it doesn’t sound like anything else.

Also coming up in the next week, I’m going to work with Rae Morris on a new song in collaboration with Matt and Tim, and the plan is to record the string parts in a certain Edwardian Gothic chapel.  So quite a busy week coming up really, when not otherwise engaged in the day job.