Miserere
21 April

Come the weekend it rained.

And it continued raining.

Good soaking rain that the garden simply lapped up.

And the countryside too.

Suddenly, driving out to Quakers in Southport on the Sunday morning, there was a shock of green everywhere. Lush. Spirit-soaring. Gladdening.

So I wasn't too much annoyed. Instead of spending time outside, Ross and I spent time inside and began the business of stripping the wallpaper off in the spare bedroom.

I've started booking for up and coming opera events. First off will be English Touring Opera in Buxton doing both Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Mozart's Seraglio. I'm particularly looking forwards to the Mozart as it is nearly twenty years since I last attended a performance. I've also booked for Donizetti's Roberto Devereux at the Buxton Festival and Delibes' Lakmé at Holland Park Opera. As Roland remarked to me, it's been a while since I was quite so self-indulgent. And it felt reasonably OK.

To help out at work, I was in on Monday whilst Steve was on holiday and then took Tuesday off. By the end of the week, it felt like a most unsatisfactory arrangement. I really felt like I had worked five days. In retrospect, the Tuesday did not seem to count.

One thing I did do on the Tuesday was to see Dr Dye about my blood test results. One of the markers has come back a little out. It is so slight a deviation that it could come within the realms of statistical shift. However, just as a precaution, she has suggested that I repeat the blood test again in a couple of weeks just to see if the same result pops up.

By Friday, I was tired but was near the end of my teaching module. Next week, I'll be in on Monday to cover the assignment and then it's marking and individual reviews. Another tiring week ahead but, by the end of it, I shall have a four day weekend to look forwards to and those performances by English Touring Opera at the Buxton Opera House.

On Friday night, Ross and I went to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool for a concert performance by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen. Entitled Music from the Sistine Chapel, the most well known piece was Allegri's Miserere. There were other works by Gregorio Allegri, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Felice Anerio and Luca Marenzio. Overall it was splendid music in a splendid setting. I don't know that I should want to hear an orchestral concert in the main cathedral; the reverberation is, understandably, pronounced.

The choir's style is precise, flowing and quite emotionally charged. Twenty odd years ago, delivery of this type of ecclesiastical music would have been performed in a very chaste, sever manner. This was almost operatic in the intensely emotive phrasing and word colouring. Trust Italian Catholicism to put more pelvis into the spiritual side of things.

I'm not saying that I dislike the performing style. In fact, I'm persuaded to distrust the sexless, anaemic purity of the English cathedral style in this period and genre of music.

The other revelation was the words. At home with a CD playing in the background, I tend solely to glory in the sound as just sound. In concert with a programme containing text and translation in front of me, I read and listened. In the case of the Miserere this may have been a mistake. For the modern ear, what dreadful words they are - Psalm 50 if you want to look it up - full of sin, being conceived in sin and atoning for sin through sacrifice. In fact, most of the texts used were very Old Testament. There doesn't seem to have been a lot of music using New Testament texts.

We left the cathedral in a quiet, meditative state. Definitely the best concert of the year so far.