A very welcome day at home after last night's gig. By  Tuesday I was sauntering through rehearsals in a nice relaxed way. Which was foolish: I'd forgotten how Emmanuelle ramps up the energy level about 20 notches as the performance approaches, so I spent the Tuesday night run-through in an exhausted mess, scrabbling around trying to remember what key I was in or what instrument I was supposed to be playing. Normally I'm reluctant to write anything into the score or parts, but there was so much happening very fast, that this week my score ended up full of very explicit pencilled instructions: bass figures, what instrument I'm playing next, what the registration will be, what notes lurk over the next page. It's good to be stretched sometimes, and I recovered control over what I was doing by the performance last night, even if I did drop a stinker of a bum note in the middle of Robin Blaze's beautiful aria towards the end - fortunately I found him standing outside a pub afterwards and could apologise. It's all on the radio on 16 September. But a great joy to work with the musical whirlwind that is la Haïm again, and to be an honorary member of the SCO cello section for a few days, which has always been the coolest orchestral section in the known universe. 

The //www.flickr.com/groups/805966@N20/pool/">Boxwood 2008 flickr group is growing nicely - you have to sign in to see all the photos.