Being ill is worse than work.

A nasty bout of tonsilitus which the nurse described as being vile, meant I missed the final rehearsal and concert of Mahler 10. One member of the section said it was excruciating, and another said it was quite enjoyable, which just goes to show you can’t trust anyone’s judgement but your own. I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work for a ‘Last night of the proms spectacular’, but bizzarely, I enjoyed it; except, inevitably, for the trumpets’ mistaken attempts at appeggiatic bravado, which uniformly ended in split notes and a mounting sense that ’something must be done’.

Next week brings a couple more days of recordings for Naxos. I can’t remember what it is we’re doing, and the schedule is in the kitchen, so I can’t see, but I’ve heard that the conductor is a reject from the Royal Ballet, which means he must be awful! Wednesday will reveal all, and I don’t mean that in an Addams family way.

Until then…

Thank god that’s over.

It’s really rare for me to feel as furious at the end of a concert as I was yesterday. As well as being a very long concert, the acoustics in the Reading Hexagon are dreadful, not even good enough for snooker it seems, because there are plans to knock the place down. It can’t happen soon enough.

The main reason for my fury was, of course, bloody Kreizburg. He conducts like a cross between a rooster, strutting and preening himself, and a cormorant hanging out its wings to dry, but without the clarity that either of those two would bring.

Every conductor is arrogant, and no-one would be able to do the job well, without thinking they had something to bring to the music, but to have the respect of an orchestra, you’ve got to have technique, and Kreizburg has none. Or, rather, I should say, he has an appalling technique, which confuses the orchestra nine times out of ten. At one stage in the rehearsals last week, there was an abrupt tempo change which was falling to pieces every time, thanks to the useless, spasmoid twitching that we were supposed to follow, so what does he do to try and solve it? He shouts at us and tells us to watch him! “It’s all there, you’ve just got to watch” he said.

My desk partner said that when he was the principal conductor for 5 years, she managed to have 3 children, so she’d be able to take the maternity leave off work. Pregnancy and childbirth is preferable to this man’s conducting, it’s official.