Incidentally, you did find something new out in your first trimester, and that is that it is impossible to sing while pregnant.
Unfortunately, you discovered this by collapsing in the middle of the winter concert of your choir.
Interesting programme. You have now added two new singing languages to your repertoire: French and Russian.
French, the conductor spent a savage five minutes saying, is the Worst Language for Singing Ever. If you remember correctly, which you probably don’t, it has no proper consonants to punctuate the words and sounds like a bunch of muddy nasal vowels run together. It is possible, he claims, to actually fall asleep from boredom in the middle of what should be the most fantastic piece of music by someone like Debussy.
Certainly you find it incredibly difficult to sing in French. This is because you have never had much of a grasp on the French accent. You may have learned French for five years at school, but the best you have ever managed in that language is ‘I would like a kilo of tomatoes, please’ uttered in the broadest of dodgy sub London tones.
So it’s quite a good thing that presumably the audience were not picking much up from the mass nose singing in that piece.
The Russian pieces, on the other hand, were easy, despite the fact that you had no idea of what you were actually saying. Perhaps because a lot of it was in Church Slavonic, but probably because your Russian has always been much more use in asking people to pass you another cup of tea than capable of sophisticated abstract discussions.
Still, it was nice to know that the language is not familiar enough for you to do the consonant clusters, which really do look jaw cracking in Latin script, without thinking and for the next syllable to be thoroughly unsurprising.
You also found the conductor’s brief masterclass on how to speak Russian quite accurate. ‘Pretend you are swallowing a watermelon’, was the advice he gave. This just confirms what you have maintained for a while: English vowels are formed at the front of the mouth, and Russian at the back, practically in the throat.
There really isn’t much to beat some of the splendidly dark notes that this can produce.
Although you did find the conductor speaking Russian in order to demonstrate some of the strings of Russian sounds quite amusing. As a result of not having much idea of what he is saying, all the phrasing goes and it sounds much more like a record being dragged around backwards than actual Russian. Luckily, he is a fiend for getting it right when singing.
So B, who had been clutching his sides in glee at the thought of quite what middle class Britishness was going to do to Rachmaninoff and the boys, was quite surprised to find that not only could he understand us in the concert, but that we actually sounded quite Russian. Once he had looked that the words in the programme, that is.
Perhaps there was hope for the French piece after all.
You rounded off the evening with what is, judging by the look of ecstatic contemplation that came over the conductor’s face every time he mentioned it, a real singers’ piece of music.
Durufle’s Requiem. Wisely written, despite the composer’s Gallic background, in Latin.
Here it is, although you really don’t think that the Cyberbass keyboards are going to do justice to the modern Gregorian chant thing Durufle has going on.
Anyway, the fainting.
Well, to be honest, after you had gone through three rehearsals without being able to stand for the whole thing, having to sit down in the middle of the cpncert in order to prevent yourself falling off the stage didn’t come as a big surprise.
It was, however, a phenomenon that was beginning to quite worry you, until a woman you had noticed sinking gracefully into her seat at about the same time as you in both the dress and the concert waved away concerned enquiries by telling everyone she was pregnant. You nearly kissed her. It apparently being a pregnancy thing rather than a Solnushka and pregnancy thing and all.
So one of the five million and two things They don’t tell you about pregnancy is: as an amateur, you can’t sing in a choir after about ten weeks.
