Dateline: London, England:
No out of town trips today as it’s the first of three days where the major order of business is musical performance and the whole reason I’m here this week. The ASO chorus (at least those who wanted to come, are joining together with other groups (Birmingham, Oxford MS, Fort Collins CO, Wales, and England) to perform a concert at Southwark Cathedral on Saturday evening. The work we are doing is a recent setting of the Latin Mass by Philip W. J. Stopford called Missa Deus Nobiscum – a hundred or so voices and full orchestra. It’s a relatively easy sing, melodic, and, judging by this afternoon’s first rehearsal with the maestro, going to be very very good. It was coming together quite well at the end of three hours. We have another rehearsal tomorrow and then dress and performance on Saturday.
The rehearsal was in St. Peter’s church, a small parish church in Belgravia on Eaton Square. It has marvelous acoustics in the sanctuary which made even some of our more lackluster moments sound quite good. It’s a relatively new church. The original building took a direct hit during the Blitz destroying most of the sanctuary and killing the then rector who was on the front portico doing fire watch that night. (During my wanderings later in the day, I ran across the monument to the firefighters of London killed in the bombings of World War II. The list of names is extremely long and a sober reminder of what the city endured not all that long ago.)
Rehearsal wasn’t until one PM so Vickie and I got up this morning, had breakfast and headed for the Tate Britain for a museum fix. it wasn’t at all crowded (the National Gallery has been a mob scene when I’ve walked past) and filled with five hundred years of British art including an enormous number of Turner paintings, drawings, and sketches. I’ve always admired his later work which seems so modern and far ahead of its time. I’m not so keen on the modern stuff. Damien Hirst’s animals suspended in formaldehyde tanks do nothing for me. I do, however, like Hockney and find Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud both interesting and disturbing. I left the museum around noon to get to rehearsal leaving Vickie to amuse herself for the afternoon and then met up with her later at St. Paul’s where she sat with her bag full of gorp, rather than crumbs. The pigeons weren’t interested.
We headed across the Millennium Bridge to the South Bank, admiring the views as the day had morphed into a perfect sunny day full of golden hour light, and had dinner at the Swan Pub attached to The Globe theater (fish and chips for her, shepherd’s pie for me without actual shepherd peppered on top) before taking our seats for A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Globe stage. I picked up some ideas for staging and line delivery for the production I’m directing starting at the end of the month (and also picked up a few things that I know I don’t want to do). The company was strong. The production interesting. But there were no real standouts in the cast other than Hermia – who was played by a woman with dwarfism who could both act and do physical comedy. And, with her size, she dominated every scene she was in.
Sometimes I wonder what Shakespeare would think if he could time travel forward four hundred and some years and see his plays are still being performed, with his original ideas and language relatively intact, and that they’ve even built a full reproduction of his original theater for them. I think he’d be pleased but also a bit confused, given that he wrote them as popular entertainments and not as literature to last. I’ve been telling my cast that Midsummer is a sex comedy, sort of a 1590s American Pie and it need not be approached too reverently.
Rehearsal again in the morning. To bed! To bed!
Life, The Universe, and Everything 