Two surprises when I arrived at St.Cuthberts’ for the rehearsal. I found myself in a group of about twenty other tenors – not a bad turnout for an endangered species – but the church was packed with 350 other singers – the largest turnout ever for one of these events. So that was the pleasant surprise. The unpleasant surprise came when I opened the score for the second piece on the programme – Mozart’s Requiem. Even the words brought not a glimmer of recognition. I had never sung this before in my life. Oops.

So what had attracted all these singers? surely not the well-known Mozart? The other piece on the programme was Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, which I had sung a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed (I can’t say that about many late 20th century works). The organisers told us that there weren’t 370 loan copies of the score to be found in the UK. They had contacted the UK publishers, who contacted the US publishers, who then contacted the composer himself for permission to photocopy. So Lauridsen knew something was afoot in Edinburgh last night.

I’m not sure what he would have thought of the performance. The score encourages conductors to pull the tempo all over the place, and the CD I have shows exactly that, with a small tightly controlled choir showing how it’s done. 370 singers singing together for the first time, many singing the piece for the first time, form a pretty intractable beast, even for as conductor as personable as Stephen Doughty.

The undoubted highlight of the whole day for me was not the chorus, but the soloists in the Mozart – students from RSAMD – in particular the young soprano, Emilie Alford. From the moment she started singing the Benedictus in the rehearsal I was entranced. Her voice had a clarity and an authority that brought tears to my eyes. She may not be cut out for a career in reality TV, but she’s the finest Mozart soprano I have heard in a long long time. Well worth sacrificing a Spring day for.

So what’s so special about it? I’ve since read MacColl’s story of how he wrote it:

The last time I climbed Suilven, or to be more precise, failed to climb it, was in my seventy-second year. I was with my wife and fourteen-year-old daughter Kitty. “You go ahead,” I told them, “I’ll meet you at the top.” But ‘the flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee’, and I hadn’t gone more than half the distance when my legs refused to carry me further. My body had given me plenty of warnings over the last seven or eight years but this was the final notice. My mountain days were over. I sat down on a rock feeling utterly desolate. The feeling lasted for several days and then my grief and feeling of loss gave way to nostalgia and I wrote The Joy of Living. In an odd kind of way it helped me to come to terms with my old age.

But it is far from being a sad song. It’s a triumphant celebration of the mountain landscapes of Scotland, England, and Wales:

Days in the sun and the tempered wind, and the air like wine.
And you drink and you drink till you’re drunk on the joy of living

and the satisfaction of a life bathed in the glow of a loving family:

You filled all my days, held the night at bay, dearest companion.
Years pass by and they’re gone with the speed of birds in flight;
Our life like the verse of a song heard in the mountains

The full lyrics are here. One to play at my funeral – no-one has ever said it better. And if there’s not a dry eye in the church, blame it on this master songsmith and an old Sicilian folk tune!

In the day job, recruitment is going well, and great team work has managed to turn round some projects that were looking decidedly shaky just a week ago. The programme is now looking distinctly healthy. A one-to-one with my boss revealed we both had some spare capacity and it was time to start setting the world to rights, so that looks interesting for the future.

Then O’Reilly have at last published my piece in praise of WordPress. I wrote this back in December as a way of saying thanks to the WordPress guys for a wonderful piece of coding. As time has gone by I realise I do less damage to open-source projects by writing words about them than by writing code for them

Also on the writing front I had a response from the APM journal. They’re running a theme on sustainability (a topic close to my heart) – I sent them a piece on sustainability in IT projects – their reply: This is a very good piece – we were all sitting here nodding heads in vigorous agreement! They then spoiled it a bit by asking me to resend it to them in MS-Word format I suppose I’ll let them publish it anyway.

And if that wasn’t enough, I met wife and student daughter after work for a quick Italian meal before going off (minus daughter) to the Usher Hall for a truly stunning performance of the Verdi Requiem by the RSNO. The RSNO Chorus gave the performance of a lifetime – everything from drifting angelic voices to a massive Hampden roar. At the end Deneve held the entire hall in absolute silence for what seemed like an eternity – pure theatre – before the place erupted.

And finally, Have I Got News For You is back for another season – so enough blogging, off to watch the box.

With the clocks going back at the weekend, it’s darker than ever in the evenings. After a particularly gruesome day at work again (see Bell Curve comments passim), it takes a real effort of will to trail out of the house and off to choir. Then it all comes together, and I float back home through the autumn leaves and chill night air with a head full of music.

And so to bed, a happy bunny again.