on balance, i suppose i win.

[fox]

Forgot my music today, so I had to do rehearsal with borrowed copies that I couldn't make marks in (and which, of course, didn't have the marks I'd previously put in, either).  Oddly, the marks do matter, even if you're sufficiently groovy (as I am) that you spend most of your time holding the score in your hand but looking up at the director.  I found myself saying to my neighbors on both sides, "Remind me of that next week, will you?"  Urgh.

Associate-conductor S didn't put his foot quite as far in his mouth this week as he did last week, and not until about half an hour into the rehearsal.  Good on him.  :-)  It was also pretty funny a little later, to hear him so comprehensively turn into R the director, with the stammering through a direction beginning three sentences before he'd even finished one of them.  Maybe it's the chair.

I am not sufficiently groovy to get solo-type things in the Chichester Psalms -- not the "Adonai, roi" solo, because as much as I'd love to sing it, what I mean by that is that I'd love to have been a boy so I could be a treble; because no matter how treble-like a soprano sounds (and I do), she's still not, in fact, a boy, and that solo is David the shepherd, so -- no, the solo I don't have is a brief one in the first movement and the "Yahel, Yisrael" stuff in the third movement, but that's okay, because my friend J is singing it and she's very good.  But I am sufficiently groovy that along with my neighbor on the right, I get a solo-type thing in the Agnus Dei.  We go up to a C flat, which of course is just a B natural, but hey, a good minor fifth above everybody else.  And it was cool!  S said "not a solo, at least two or three of you -- volunteers?" and K and I said sure, we'll give it a shot, (and chorus master T, at the piano, played the phrase a couple of times, and I thought it sounded like "Bali H'ai", only not really, but it was helpful,) and we did the thing, and S said "I think that works!  That's a keeper!"  Go us.

For people who have been scared away by three programs of Weird Music in a row (not counting Carmina Burana or Messiah, I guess; I mean Christmas and then Mystics and then Shakespeare), do not be afraid of this one!  It's good stuff, and plus you can see me and sanj (ETA: and sadcypress!) for the price of one.  Friday, June 22.  Come on down.

Comments

[sadcypress.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! I wondered who was singing the B's- I couldn't tell from the back of the Alto section. Good for you. :)

And I am SO pleased I am not the only one who longs to be a boy soprano.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

And you could hear us? Excellent! (There are times I'm just not sure what's audible outside of our section. In "Stomp", for example, a bunch of the seconds are still missing the thirds on "happy" and whatever the other word is, but S and T either don't know or aren't worried about it yet; someone behind me went to talk to T in the break. Who, incidentally, every time we go to the high A instead of the high B at the end of "The Promise of Living", I can see him banging the B on the piano to try to give us the pitch, and I suppose it's sweet that he thinks we'll be able to hear it ... Anyway, that high bit in "Agnus", everyone else around us is so loud, I can hear myself but not really hear K right next to me. Glad it doesn't get drowned out from across the room. [g])