Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece

I have done almost nothing for the past 5 days. Having finally got through July I have a few weeks of relative peace and quiet (apart from an audition in Lucerne and a concert in Worcester Cathedral) before it all kicks off again in September.

I’ve been turning my attention once again to web design and plans for my personal and design business sites. I’ve also changed my Blogger template to something closer to what I hope my personal site’s going to look like, as I’m intending to have this blog as part of a more general personal site.

I also need a new, slightly less self-important title for the blog. Something along the lines of “Don’t Forget Your Mouthpiece” which I have done from time to time. If anyone can come up with a better one, then, well, I suppose I could offer some sort of prize. It might not be very good though. I’m still waiting to get paid for all the work I did in July.

Well, not exactly, but it feels like it compared to the previous few weeks.I’m sitting on my hotel room balcony overlooking the harbour in a lovely little town called (I think) Langeland, in Denmark. I’m here with an ABBA tribute show that I play in from time to time. Tonight we’re playing at a festival here - and when you’re 4th on the bill at the Langelands Festival in between Runrig and UB40, you know you’ve made it. Then we’ve got 2 more dates in Malmo and Dalhalla, near Stockholm.

Touring is a pain in many ways but one of its redeeming features is the fact that you don’t have to think about anything - just turn up at a given time, be driven to venue, fed and watered, rehearse, do gig, more food, hotel bar, bed, up, breakfast, turn up at a given time etc. etc. It’s certainly less stressful than having to worry about catching trains, or, as I have been discovering, having to drive somewhere you haven’t been before.

My lovely new Fiat Punto has done nearly 1500 miles in 2 weeks, which is a lot for it to handle given that it scarecly managed 5000 a year under its previous owner. In that time it has (gently) nudged a concrete pillar while I tried to park it in a multi-storey near Symphony Hall in Birmingham, nearly broken free of its own handbrake while halfway up a hill in Malvern, and had the driver’s door swing open on the way out of Waitrose car park in Monmouth. (Yes all right, only because I forgot to shut it properly. Mirror-Signal-Manoeuvre-Shut Door.) Driving is still largely a new experience for me, and I do get a bit wound up when I’m in a hurry or don’t know where I’m going, like when trying to get out of Birmingham in horizontal rain on Sunday night, as the M6 kept appearing tantalisingly on my left, then right, then left again…

The reason for all this driving about was a spell of work the ESO have been doing with Nigel Kennedy, who I have to say has been truly inspirational. I’ve never been a fan of what I’ve seen as manufactured artists, trying to fill a niche with their image rather than their musicianship, and I had assumed Kennedy was one such artist, but no. Yes, he turns up to rehearsals fashionably late, dressed like Sid Vicious and swears copiously (”yeah man, this motherf**king bar here…less espressivo, or some sh*t like that”), but where the music is concerned, there can be no accusation of gratuitous iconoclasm or lack of taste. His playing is quite simply gorgeous. Even when he forgoes the 1738 Guarneri del Gesu (doesn’t react well to summer Malvern temperatures) and picks up “me f**kin’ cardboard violin”, his sound, his virtuosity and range of expression are just breathtaking.

His concerts are equally “serious” affairs. He banters with the audience - “Did you know if you nick a cat, it’s not a crime unless you kill it” and pokes fun at the orchestra leader in a “mind-reading” demonstration - “Michael, you can’t do that with animals in public mate, I’ve told you before”, as soon as he lifts his bow it’s deathly silent and you know you’re in for a treat. You haven’t heard the Elgar Violin Concerto until you’ve seen Nigel Kennedy do it.

In short, I don’t care whether the punk-rocker act is genuine or not. His playing is spectacular and totally sincere, and no other classical artist I’ve ever seen has such a connection with his audience. Any of the idiots who carp on about classical music being elitist and irrelevant should go and see this guy.

Anyway it’s time to go do ABBA. I’ll try and keep you posted on tour goings-on.

It’s Sunday lunchtime and I’m collapsed in my living room, anticipating a day of sport on telly. A few highlights from the week:

1. I am no longer an employee of the Barbican Centre.
2. Philip Wilby remembers my mum very well, “I used to like her in physics”.
3. Passed driving test with 9 minor faults. Suggest you all avoid the roads around Blackheath and Lee Green for a little while.
4. Dublin looks like the sort of city I might like, though having missed my flight I spent less than 2 hours there, so I can’t be certain. It’s certainly a nifty way of putting pressure on yourself, having an audition panel wait an hour and a half for you. They were all very nice about it though.

So I’m determined to use this day off for as much inactivity as possible, as it all starts up again tomorrow.

Apologies to regular readers (do I have any of those yet?) for my lack of postings of late. Also for lack of Barcelona photos, which didn’t come out. (Note to self: mobile phone cameras are no good in sunny climes because you can’t read LCD screens in broad daylight.)

I thought I’d take a moment (at quarter to two on Monday morning) to share with you the details of my week ahead, which contains one or two significant events, as well as a lot of travelling around.

In 6 hours time I’ve got to leave to go to Warwick, where I’m starting a little run of work as a guest in the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble. We’re doing two educational concerts in the morning and then rehearsing some new music in the afternoon. One of the pieces we’re doing is by Philip Wilby, a Leeds-based composer who I’ve never met before, but apparently went to school with my mum.

Tuesday (back to London) comprises a driving lesson as well as my last shift at the Barbican. I won’t say I’ll miss the place, however for a bunch of work mates you couldn’t do much better than the stewards at the Barbican. Note to anyone who might have cause to go to the Barbican - be nice to the stewards. They’re incredibly knowledgable/talented and will bend over backwards to help you, and when things go wrong its almost never their fault, but of course they’re the ones who field all the complaints / accusations / downright unreasonable stroppiness from the public.

Wednesday I’m teaching all day. Thursday is my third (and, fingers crossed, final) attempt to pass my driving test, followed by another trip up to Warwick to rehearse with Fine Arts, followed by the concert which is on Friday night. Then it’s back to town, and straight back out of town on Saturday to fly to Dublin to audition for the RTE National Symphony Orchestra. Back same day.

Sunday is my own (at the moment, anyway). So hopefully I’ll catch up with you then and let you know how it all went.

I’m in Barcelona.

I wasn’t quite prepared for going to Barcelona. I applied for a job at the Liceu (the opera house here) weeks and weeks ago, and having heard nothing back assumed I hadn’t been invited. But I came back from a gig on Friday night to find the invitation on the doormat. It only took 2 weeks to get there from Spain.

So a relaxing weekend went tits-up as I spent most of it finding flights and hotels, cancelling Barbican shifts <irony>boo-hoo!</irony>, and practising the 2 concertos and copious orchestral excerpts set out in the invitation, and on Tuesday evening found myself outside Girona airport in the pissing-down rain.

The audition was a strange affair. For those of you not au fait with the complexities of orchestral hiring practises, the standard process in the UK comprises several days of auditions after which a few candidates are chosen to work with the orchestra for short periods of time in order for the rest of the section to decide who they’re comfortable with. This process can take months or often years, but is a good way for young professionals to get their foot in the door when it comes to extra work.

On the continent, they try to build Rome in a day, by holding two or three rounds and aggressively pruning the field until they’re left with their person, or, as happened in this case, they’re left with nobody at all. The initial field of 27 was cut to 4 for the second round (I was one of the four) and then after that we were informed that none of us had been deemed suitable for the post. So the whole process starts again in a few weeks or months.

I was pleasantly surprised to have got that far, and if I’d had a better night’s sleep (thanks to the Irish school party across the hotel courtyard and the couple engaged in vigorous copulation next door) who knows what might have happened? Anyway, in homage to my Rough Guide to Spain which has served me well these past 2 days, here are my top tips for foreign auditions:

1. Take a good book. They won’t let you leave the building until it’s over, and the temptation to over-warm up can be great. I was in there from 9.30 until 1, and in front of the panel for about 15 minutes.
2. Don’t pick Strauss 2 unless you can rehearse with the pianist first.
3. Either cough up for a decent hotel, or take earplugs.

More on the touristy bits (suffice to say now that the Sagrada Familia is just incredible) and maybe some pics when I get back.

Having spent most of the day trying to get a niggly little JavaScript to work for my OU coursework, I must here give thanks to the truly wonderful Mozilla Firefox, without which I would now be a gibbering wreck.

For the un-initiated among you, Firefox is an Internet browser, like Internet Explorer, but better, for so many reasons, the most important of which are:

1. It’s FREE. You can download it here.
2. It’s faster and better-looking than IE.
3. It has a JavaScript Console which points out mistakes in your code (like when you only put 4 close-brackets at the end of a line rather than 5. JavaScript is that fiddly.) This is precisely the device which has saved my sanity today. With IE you basically have to guess where your bugs are.
4. You can get a Web Developer extension which gives you a load of little gadgets for helping you with site design, including a style sheet editor and a colour picker.
5. You can also get a load of other useful widgets including FoxyTunes, which allows you to play your mp3s without having to open iTunes or Napster or whatever. Others include the George W. Bush Idiocy Meter and an egg timer (soft, medium and hard-boiled settings).
6. It’s not by Microsoft, which in itself has numerous benefits:
   • It works properly.
   • It doesn’t have all those stupid “security features” which are in actual fact designed to bludgeon you into only using Microsoft products.
   • It doesn’t add to Bill Gates’s already disgustingly distended bank balance.
7. Did I mention the egg timer?

Anyway, thank you for listening to this blatant Firefox plug. Get it today from www.getfirefox.com.

Can you hear me? ENO war of words

English National Opera, whose founding principle since 1931 has been singing opera in English, has announced plans to display the text of its operas above the stage..

Paul Daniel, outgoing music director of ENO, was unavailable for comment, but has said: “Surtitles make audiences passive and castrated. You cannot feel an opera in your bollocks if you are just having the information fed to you.”

Chaps - if any of you feel an opera in your bollocks, please consult your GP immediately…

I’m returning to London tomorrow, having not spotted the killer whales again.

Bizarrely, there’s still a 30 minute check-in at the airport (this is Kirkwall airport, where you only have to walk 30 yards from the check-in desk to the plane), so I’m going to be up early.

It’s been absolutely brilliant, if any of you have never been to Orkney before, GO - NOW. And, preferably, stay at my folks’ B&B, the website for which will be my first web design project. Watch this space.

This afternoon I saw a FAMILY of KILLER WHALES!(Or a POD of ORCA, to give them their botanically correct name).

No, I’m not joking. Nor did I end up in Orlando instead of Orkney. There they were, no more than 100 yards off the coast, surfacing every 30 seconds or so, and moving north at an imressive rate. There were at least 2 adults and 3 young, judging by the size of the fins and tails we were seeing.

I can tell you don’t believe me. Bollocks to the lot of you. They tend to hang around for a few days, so I’m going to get a photo of them if I have to camp out for 48 hours. Stay tuned…

Meanwhile, here are a few pics…

This is Dad in his studio.

This is Susan, with Buster, who is the star of today’s episode.

Buster likes cows…

… but not as much as he likes rabbits.

Or biscuits, for that matter.

BTW Did I mention I saw a pod of orca this afternoon?

I have decided given that my cab arrives in 2 hours it’s not worth going to bed.

I’m figuring out what work to take with me. Unfortunately the horn has to come as I have the Mendelssohn Nocturne as well as possibly a 1st horn audition in Spain coming up, so have removed all sharp objects (except the top A) from the case.

I’ve also just remembered I’m supposed to be doing an arrangement for the horn department at Juillard, which I blithely said on April 12th would be ready in about a month, so that’s coming too.

The OU course materials are in the suitcase as well. At the moment it basically involves digesting large chunks of JavaScript and then being told “this affects accessibility, so you probably shouldn’t use it. Probably.”

I’m not going to take any music, but am taking the Godfather trilogy and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on DVD to cross off on my List of Great Films I Haven’t Seen (Battle of Britain didn’t arrive in time).

I tend not to be a big Walkman person, nor do I have an iPod yet. I read a letter in Time Out a while ago in response to someone asking what the verb was for the process of copying CDs on to an iPod. The reply was something like as follows:

To copy music from CD onto an mp3 player is to ‘rip’. To do same onto an iPod is to ‘be a cloth-eared style victim’.

This made me smile. In truth that’s not why I don’t have one, I’m sure they’re good and all, I just don’t tend to listen to a lot of music when on the move. I do have iTunes (admittedly a pretty nifty piece of software) on my desktop and have a fairly large collection on there. It’s all moved on a bit since the day when aged about 8 I got my first personal stereo, which bewitched me with its ability to play Side B without having to turn the tape over.