What I did on my holidays...

Well, you will see from the dates that this last few weeks has been a bit quiet on the blog front.

For those of you who don't get the Vocal Process ezine (and if not, why not, it's free?), I have recently become the Musical Director of the Scarborough Spa Orchestra. This is the only remaining summer season orchestra in the UK, and I first worked there 18 years ago.

The orchestra performs a staggering 10 concerts a week every week for a 15-week season, and each programme is different. The morning concerts take place in the outdoor bandstand attached to the Spa Building, and the evening concerts happen in the Grade II listed Spa Grand Hall.

The interview process for the post took almost four months, and I will be writing about it in a later blog. I applied in July, and was appointed towards the beginning of December. Although the season doesn't officially start until the beginning of June 2007, the orchestra have formed the habit of giving a New Year's Day concert, and this became my first full concert.

It was a cracking programme with waltzes and polkas from four of the Strauss family, together with music from Suppe, Lehar and Novello. One of the scariest things about this job is that many of the musicians have been doing the season for years, which left me conducting a band of musicians who knew the music better than I did.

Needless to say this is an occupational hazard as a conductor. Many years ago I took over a touring show in Germany. I had a single performance to meet the cast, learn the repertoire and watch the show before taking over the following day. Due to some rather strange circumstances, I didn't even know what the show was called or which pieces were included when I arrived at Hamburg airport. So my reaction to the musicians when I faced them in the pit the following day at the sound check was "this is the downbeat, this movement brings you off, and you all know the rest of it better than I do, so do your thing - I'll twitch occasionally."

That encapsulates rather neatly the art of conducting, I feel.

Anyway, it must have worked because after my regulation two weeks with the show, I was invited by the orchestra to rejoin the show (unfortunately I had other commitments). And many years later that single fortnight was remembered by one of the members of the band, who is now a regular in the Scarborough Spa Orchestra.

So after a too-short rehearsal on the day, there I was on stage looking out on almost 800 people - one of the largest audiences the New Year's Day concert has had.

What makes the job both exhilarating and more than a little tiring is that not only am I conducting, I am playing piano (and arranging almost at sight while I go along to include any parts that are missing), and also compering the entire proceedings. Oh, and checking the timing of the concert. It does mean that there isn't a second when I'm on stage that I can switch off.

I love working with an audience, and the Scarborough concert-goers are a friendly lot. I think I finally won them over by the first encore, when they enthusiastically followed my request to provide the "pop" for the champagne polka oro-digitally. While it may look easy to entertain an audience, there is actually a tremendous amount of research that goes into presenting a programme. I had my trusty clipboard with interesting pieces of information gleaned from a week of research.

Did you know that the Blue Danube waltz, quite apart from featuring in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, has appeared in Monty Python and Spongebob Squarepants? And that the Czardas is loosely based on a Hungarian verbunkos which was a recruiting dance for the army? Nowadays they just send you a DVD.

I think I escaped with my reputation intact. I'll let you know how the season goes...

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