Monday, August 22, 2011

A Lot of Help From My Friends

Rehearsal yesterday was good! Playing Vivaldi all day with the most glorious players has to the most fun imaginable.
The support team is making this project possible for me.

The very first person to begin working very hard was Mitchell Clarke, our copyist.  We got the facsimiles on DVD from Italy and he did the hard work of transcribing 7 of the concerti onto the computer (the C Major had already been done by David Bowles for the Meg Quigley competition).  Mitch also took our last minute corrections and generated new scores and parts in time for the session and the work will continue afterwards to prepare our new edition for publication.
Yesterday, the people and work started coming together.   Instruments were loaded into the house and tuned by their makers  (chamber organ made by Thom Linken, harpsichord built by Borys Medicky) and leave today to the Glenn Gould Studio.  I forgot to turn off the organ last night. I won’t forget the look on Thom’s face this morning when he came to get it.  Will remember today... don’t want smoke pouring out of it during the slow movements!   
Our librarian Neil Bishop stayed up all night adding final corrections in parts and arranging all parts with good page turns.  Then he stayed for the 6 hours of rehearsal to notate dozens more corrections, many of them decisions that Nic is making on behalf of Vivaldi (has to be done in some cases!)
Guy Few made the most beautiful snack table in the world and kept us going all day.  And helped move the harpsichord out this morning.  And fetched Nic Mcgegan from the airport.
Megan Morris drove to Buffalo on Saturday to fetch our engineer and equipment, then yesterday picked up our Quebec-based cellist from the airport and she helped all day with moving equipment.
With all of this help I had time to do my video interview for WholeNote magazine in the morning, make enough reeds to get me through the session and have a cappuccino.
Today the sessions start.  John Edwards (lutenist, organ mover) shouted as he left the house this morning with Thom in the organ-delivery pickup truck:  “Good luck!  And remember that nothing in this world is perfect” --- somehow exactly the right thing to say.

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