Wednesday, July 17, 2002 09:30
Location: On the bus
Weather: Cooler, sunny again

Oops. Missed two days of the old journal. Time to get cracking!

Monday we trucked off to Novgorod for the day and for our first concert of the tour. It's a three hour drive south of St. Petersburg, but it was a pretty dull trip, basically flat with trees and farms on either side. Our tour guide yammered non-stop on the way down, probably good info, to be fair, but not fully appreciated by our card-playing group, still tired from the night before. The bus was a quasi double decker with a small cabin stuck in the back below the main deck, where we sat for the trip. It was quite warm, and after a while we started noticing that the back smelled of fuel fumes, so we didn't feel all that well by the time we arrived.

We pulled into an Intourist Hotel in Novgorod, where we had lunch. We then drove to the Novgorod Philharmonic Hall for a dress rehearsal of the Brahms. It went really well. The orchestra has dramatically improved over the last few days, though the horns are still occasionally astray.

After the rehearsal we had a delay before a walking tour of the town, but I was so exhausted that by the time we were set to go I'd decided to bail out on the tour and get some rest. I'd made a lot of mistakes during the rehearsal and needed to get some energy back.

After a light snack (a banana, some bread and cheese, and water) we changed for the concert. Because of the heat we decided to skip wearing the tuxedo jackets, which turned out to be a great decision as even without them we were sweating profusely. The locals came out in force (tickets ranged from 15R to 30R, i.e. from C$0.75 to $1.50) and went very well.

We returned to the Intourist Hotel for another meal, then got back into the buses to go back to St. Petersburg. We got back to the hotel at 1 in the morning, and went straight to bed.

On Tuesday morning (yesterday) I had planned to get up and downtown fairly early, but was still very tired and had to do some laundry so I didn't make it out of the hotel until after 10. I was just leaving the driveway on my way to the Metro when one of our buses went by on the way downtown. They stopped to pick me up, and I hopped on. Mistake: it took over an hour to get downtown, versus about 30 minutes (including the walk) by subway.

I went to the Internet cafe and updated my diary, then walked back to the Shostakovich Hall (Bolshoy Zal -- "Big Hall") and on to a blini kiosk, Teremok, in a little park nearby. I had a delicious ham and cheese blini for 40R ($2).

Back in the hall our recording engineers were scrambling to get their equipment set up for our recording session in the afternoon. They'd been locked out for two hours in the morning, so had lost a lot of the time they'd planned on using to get everything set before our arrival.

The recording session ran into almost every conceivable problem, but was still judged a success. On top of our late start, we had some construction hammering outside, people walking through the hall, dishes clattering from the cafeteria overhead, a couple of delays for missing orchestra members, and finally a rain storm which ruined the last 20 minutes of recording time. We only completed tape for 3 of the 7 movements of the Requiem, so we're going to have to do a good job in the performance tonight!
posted by Tom at 9:52 AM | link |