Sops, shall I compare thee to the alto section? Thou art much shriller, and more numerous

It was our Shakespeare concert this week, and a good time was had by all in the choir and hopefully all in the audience too. There really was some fabulous music on the programme, and we felt like we did most of it justice. After last week’s soloist despair for the Gardner, the sops did all end up singing the O Mistress Mine solo in unison, which was a relief. The Gardner Shakespeare Sequence is definitely a piece to make us all long for safety in numbers, and luckily that wasn’t a problem for the sops as there are simply loads of us. (In fact the biggest challenge of the night was fitting us all on the stage. Second-row-Emma-and-Kath were actually singing from the wings for a while). But generally the Gardner went much better than some of us had been fearing. Under the Greenwood Tree I remember being a particular shambles when we last performed it, but this time we got it bang on. Lots of the other pieces really came together too. Applebaum’s Witches Blues was good enough that we were in danger of enjoying it too much – we were belting it out like a big band in the afternoon rehearsal, until David-the-Conductor pointed out that were singing about birth-strangl’d babes so perhaps the big grins and jazz hands weren’t so appropriate. Hopefully we nastied it up enough for the concert. The Vaughan Williams and the Mäntyjärvi were probably the most challenging pieces on the programme, but from the stage it felt like we got the spirit of them, if possibly not quite all of the notes. All in all we were pretty happy with how it went, and I confess to being even more happy that there’s no more Gardner on the programme for the rest of the year. We’re on Gardning leave.

So I have decided to START A RUMOUR that Jaakko Mäntyjärvi was in the audience. If you are in the choir or were at the concert, I urge you to join me in spreading this to those who don’t read the blog. Please say “oh yes, I saw him, he was the tallish shortish oldish youngish guy with lightish darkish hair sitting in the front near the back”. I was actually sure I’d spotted him in the audience for a while, but before you put too much faith in that assertion, bear in mind that I don’t know what he looks like and I also saw Stacey from EastEnders and my dead grandfather. But there was definitely someone there who looked a bit Finnish, so that’s good enough evidence for me.