Almost

After two months of frantic rehearsal, tomorrow evening sees our first concert of the season. It comes around sooner than you expect. To be honest, you feel a few more hours of practice would prove useful: would iron out some minor irregularities, such as singing the wrong words to the wrong notes, and coming in at the wrong time, and possibly even turning up at the wrong venue. The orchestra somehow seems to be able to waltz through substantial works with relatively limited rehearsal, whereas we in the choir require months of crawling through the score note by note, deconvoluting complex cross rhythms and making wild guesses at strangely shifting harmonies. But we get there eventually. More or less. I suppose that is the charm of live performance: you never can predict how it will turn out. And it never sounds exactly the same twice.

Oddly, my cooking is somehow similar: a recipe never seems to come out the same twice. I would never cope cooking in a restaurant, where, presumably, customers would expect the dish they ordered last week to taste the same if ordered today. But perhaps that soupçon of unpredictability adds to the occasion.