Tags
Anghiari Festival, Capriccio Italien, Everyone Sang, It's A Long Way To Tipperary, Military Medley, Occam Singers, Southbank Sinfonia, Tchaikovsky, Through the Fair, Virgin Media
The Occam Singers were on tip top form yesterday evening, performing a mixture of repertoire to a packed church in Guildford, repertoire which included my Military Medley and Through The Fair. We even managed to get the audience whistling and singing along to It’s A Long Way To Tipperary, which was certainly entertaining. Today has been busy, and as I write I am on a break between two rehearsals in preparation for the Anghiari Festival, mainly gorgeous Baroque repertoire with a group of young musicians from Southbank Sinfonia.
I am still in grave danger of falling asleep on the tube at any point, but that happens during normal daily life so may not be jet-lag induced anyway. Hopefully things will have righted themselves by tomorrow and I will be able to get back on with my daily business of writing, arranging, dodging junk mail from Virgin Media and so on.
I tidied up a couple of moments in an arrangement this morning, for my over keen use of the “Paste” control had led me to omit two bars in Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien. I hate making errors like that, but I was up against a very tight deadline, and it still represents an error percentage of around 0.4%. Reliability like that would never have got astronauts to (or off) the Moon, but it is not so shabby for orchestral parts.
As the summer approaches there is a little bit of a lull in performances of my music, after the storm of the past seven days. On the other hand it is shaping up to be a summer of writing, and fulfilling writing too, something like three or four commissions lining up at the moment, with more to come, I hope. It means that there should be a decent selection of performances to come after the holidays, even if the first will not be until September, probably the first performance of Everyone Sang.
I am tempted to look at the past year and take stock of what has happened, but it is not quite my blogiversary yet, not for another couple of weeks at least. This gives me time yet to sneak a couple of new developments in under the wire before I have to face my shareholders and come up with an annual report.
Nicholas O'Neill 