Tuesday 26 September 2000

Exhausted after long rehearsal today, but it was fun.  The McGibbon stuff, which we haven’t tried out before, went like a bomb, and the Muffat pieces that are new to us worked well too.  The old Oswald favourites come out sounding different every time, which is great – we’re familiar enough with the style now not to have to worry about every note, or who plays when.

In the evening session we were in the hands of Ben Twist for a stagecraft rehearsal – just practising the mechanics of going on and off, bowing or not as the case may be, trying to get me to stand still while talking to the audience.  Hard work.  How much of it we’ll remember in the course of a long concert remains to be seen, but it’s very valuable to put time aside to deal with all that side of things.  There’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you can’t project it in a convincing manner.

So now, while everyone else is in the pub, I can think about priorities for tomorrow’s rehearsal and draw up a schedule …