26-April-99

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We had the last rehearsal before the Project Manna concert tonight. We have a couple of high school students playing electric guitar and drum kit on one piece, and the drummer warmed up after the choir had warmed up. When Gennady was ready to start the first piece, he asked the drummer to give us an A.

When Laurel rehearsed us in Samachti, I remembered what she had said last week about picturing Jerusalem as we sang it. Maybe I overdid it. It was like Photoshop layers; she stayed in focus conducting, but images of the view from the walls of the old city, the court in front of the Burnt House, the arch, the Cardo, were right there layered over her. It's been like that lately with a couple of klezmer pieces, too. When we play the Russian Sher I look right through the music and see the route from where we were staying in Moscow down the Arbat, along the street in front of the Bibliotek Imine Lenin, to Alexandrovsky Sad park by the Kremlin walls. The Russian waltz we do is overlayed with the memory of walking with Arlene and Anne from the ballet in St. Petersburg back to our hotel in the late afternoon lighting at 10:30 PM.

Plus, I finally got caught up with stamp indexing; I did seven of our new designs after choir rehearsal, and still had time to check my E-mail and write this.