Robert McFall
It’s Friday. I woke at 6 am after an evening in which I made the dangerous switch from beer (post-rehearsal drink with colleagues) to wine (watching Question Time and This Week with Ann and George).
Workshops start on Monday out at Heriot Toun Studio and you can follow our progress on this new Blog every day next week. First up will be composer Amble Skuse with a couple of pieces called “Sea Longing” and “Dochas”. We have received scores for these. We also have a score for Wednesday’s composer, Scott McLaughlin. We still await scores from the other three composers, Julien Longchamp, Marc Estibeiro and Matthew Collings. Setting up happens the day after tomorrow, with me hiring a city car club van to take a lot of heavy boxes out there. There’s a daunting amount to plan. This afternoon Brian, Rick, Jo and I are off to Glasgow City Halls to play (or, in Jo’s case, sing) in a Scottish Chamber Orchestra performance of the Mozart Requiem – and tomorrow the same in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. In the meanwhile I need to re-familiarise myself with playing my electric violin – it’s been a while and Scott’s piece requires some very fine microtuning. I need to check that I have spare strings – a visit to Gordon Stevenson is required, in part also because I owe my orchestral desk partner an E string.
On other fronts, I finally got the score of “The Okavango Macbeth” off to the publishers yesterday. That marks the end of a massive project which absorbed a lot of my time over last autumn and winter. There’s planning going on also for various potential gigs in August, as well as a couple of collaborations with guitarist Malcolm MacFarlane in June and July. At the same time Jo and I are trying to negotiate our way into various UK festivals for 2012. Jo, Alex and Anna have been working furiously on re-designing the web site – with a public unveiling promised for noon today. Meanwhile the house needs cleaning and the garden’s screaming out for attention...it’s even beautiful weather, which gives me no excuse...
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