One Messiah down, one to go.

It went fine. That’s all I can really say. Okay, sure, I felt there were a lot more wrong notes than usual (this always happens in the heat of performance: people get all excited and forget to look at their music and make mistakes), but according to one discerning audience member, it wasn’t noticeable. He felt that we were very well blended, there was a good balance between the orchestra and the choir, and that’s reassuring. The conductor was happy. The soloists were all right. The bass was really good. I took him aside before the concert started and mentioned the pronunciation of the word “the” and he said he’d try to remember. He did, too, sometimes, and other times forgot.

During one soprano solo, I know that my..., I happened to glance over at the altos and saw one girl all red in the face, looking miserable, and I realized that she was suffering from a tickle in her throat and was unable to cough for fear of being heard. The poor thing. I remember experiencing the same thing myself when I was in a choir as a young woman, and how the hoped for applause after the number where I was holding it in didn’t happen and the choir seguéd into the next piece, causing tears to roll down my cheeks from the effort of holding back the cough which I was dying to have. Luckily for this poor girl, there was applause (such philistines, this audience tonight) after the solo, and she got to release and assuage the tickle.

Afterwards, François shook my hand and thanked me for being in the choir, and I told him that I was also une très bonne soliste, and he expressed interest in auditioning me. We shall see what comes of that.

Hubby and I drove out to the Purolator place to pick up a box which no one was home yesterday to accept delivery of, and it turned out to be from his sister, containing Christmas and birthday presents. She got me a cookbook by one of my favourite authors, M0IIie Katzen, that I did not heretofore have, as a belated 50th present. I’m going to be 51 in just over a month. This was very belated!

A very strange thing happened last night when I was winding the clock. I was pulling the chain with my right hand and supporting the weight with my left, when suddenly the weight came off in my hand, pulley and all, and the chain all fell over to one side. My first thought was that the chain had broken, but it had not. I couldn’t understand how it could disengage itself from the pulley, unless it pulled a Möbius strip maneuver on me. I can’t figure out how to fix this, and the horlogiste won’t be able to come by to repair it until we get back from the Dominican Republic, which is where we’re going next week for a week.

Tomorrow night we get to do it all over again, this time in different acoustics. My knee rebelled at intermission. I wonder what will give out tomorrow night.

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