So what did I do earlier in the year? One thing was joining the Bath Camerata for their Good Friday performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Wells Cathedral. These days the Good Friday concerts, when the choir is expanded with former members, are the only times I sing with this choir, and in fact I hadn’t been able to do a Good Friday for a few years. So it was exciting to be in such excellent vocal company again, especially as the Cathedral was full for the concert. There was a new piece ‘Why weepest thou in wild array’, to which I and the other additional singers contributed plainchant interludes while everyone else was distributed around the building.
Sadly, it wasn’t such a success from the social point of view. Because I hadn’t sung with the choir for a while, I think few of them remembered me; at any rate only a couple of them asked me how I was and what I’d been doing, and in the performance I and the other imported singers were shunted on to a back row behind the others where I couldn’t see the conductor (until someone in front of me decided at the last minute not to sing).
The rehearsals for 2006’s Good Friday concert have begun. One improvement on last time: a current member of the choir came up to me before the rehearsal and started a conversation – but it turned out that in the dark he’d mistaken me for someone else!