Well, what a busy week it’s been! Ironically, I’ve been so busy that I almost had no time to write about how busy I’ve been. I’m writing on Sunday evening after our concert of Mendelssohn Psalms and the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Christmas Carols. It went well despite corners appearing in the concert that didn’t appear in the rehearsal. Nerves will do that to you, I think.
The Mendelssohn contained echoes of Bach, of course, but also of the Brahms German Requiem that we performed five times in one year once. The Vaughan Williams is, of course, so English, its lush, tight strings reminiscent of mists rolling over gentle hills and babbling streams meandering into the distance.
I was singing last night, too. My dog training friend asked me last week to perform a couple of Christmas numbers at our annual dinner. You can’t just get up and sing, though. It’s not like Ireland where, apparently, one person in any old pub has to sing the first few notes of a local ditty and suddenly they’re accompanied by virtuoso musicians and then the whole pub joins in. Everyone is in tune. Everyone knows the words.
No, songs have to be prepared. For one thing, I often forget the words. And then me singing just the tune isn’t going to sound great without an accompaniment. I found this quite easily in the form of karaoke backing tracks on YouTube Music, a whole new world to me. I spent some time on Friday trying to find an accompaniment in a key that wasn’t too low but in the end settled on A flat, which is still a tad too low..
So there I was, yesterday morning, practising Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Judy Garland’s WWII version of the song. For various reasons I wasn’t emotionally in a strong enough place to sing about hoping that people we love will come back so that we will all be together again, and I kept bursting into tears. I do love songs with meaningful words, but my emotional involvement can threaten my rendition of a song. I still need to learn to sing like a machine.
It was all I could do to hold it together during the performance, but I could see that some of my audience were moved, which was gratifying. The other song was Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! The first line about the weather outside being frightful suddenly seemed rather inappropriate given the fury of Storm Darragh the previous night but perhaps it struck a chord, and I did manage not to sing about bringing some porn for copping.
Music of a different kind was on offer on Friday night. You see, when I originally clicked with delight on the email from the Royal Albert Hall, I was confused and thought it was Harry Connick Junior doing a gig. The husband is keen on his music so I thought it would make a nice pre-Christmas treat. For a millisecond as my finger hovered over the Buy Tickets button, I hesitated, wondering whether I had got this wrong, but I clicked anyway and this is how we ended up seeing Jamie Cullum, who was absolutely consummate as a muscian, and seemed a great guy as well, making time for an ingenious and creative donation initiative on behalf of Warchild.
We had one of the RAH’s loggia boxes and arrived to a party in full swing, with one of the occupants doling out Champange to his five companions. It turned out in the end that at least some of them had only just met but that didn’t stop them getting literally roaring drunk together. They chatted and sang almost incessantly through the show, the volume become louder and more and more irritating, and let me tell you that their renditions of Mr Cullum’s songs did not surpass his.
Of course, no-one want to be a party pooper, especially at Christmas, and you do expect fans of the artist to sing along a bit but we had come to hear Jamie Cullum and not the squawkings of Mr. Mine GeneorousHostIrishman and his companion Janice from Essex. The depths were plumbed when Jamie and his special guest Anna Lapwood on the thundering RAH organ quietened the mood with an atmospheric segue of Silent Night into In The Bleak Midwinter (Darke tune), my favourite carol, where the merry drunks around us insisted on chatting at high volume all the way through. I told them to shut up and received indignant and threatening looks from the American man in front of me.
Honestly, though, what is it with rude people now? Time was when people respected the artists they’d come to hear or see but now it seems that people feel that they can behave however they want if they pay enough money for the privilege, regardless of how it affects other people. Bullingdon times. The sheer entitlement! I did complain on the feedback form but of course it’s not the RAH’s fault. It has, however, put me off booking any loggia box tickets at that venue again. 5,000 people in the audience and we had to be stuck with the crassest people in London.
Talking of early pre-Christmas fun, I came across this Substack from India Knight this week addressing people who complain that people start their Christmas prep too early. India makes the point that this is exactly the time to have festive fun, before it gets to stressful, as in undoubtedly will.
In this vein, this week’s Works for Me is a ceramic bun tin from the Aga Cookshop. I wish I’d known about these years ago. I have tried all sorts of bun tins in various metals, silicone, stainless steel, all sorts but my mince pies have always stuck, making me doubt my pastry-making skills. I suspect this also has something to do with my blind obedience to the exhortations of Mrs Warren, our Domestic Science teacher, who told us never to grease with pastry. I kept to that advice for almost half a century but I’m here to tell you that this is rubbish and a lie, and that buttering your ceramic tin well before putting the little crimped discs into the apertures makes them turn out like a dream.
It’s now almost 1.30 am so I’m going to stop there. Enjoy your week of pre-Christmas fun, remembering also that Advent was traditionally a time of fasting. I don’t know why I typed that.
Have fun. Be good. Look after each other.
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