audition etc

Dear MerrowSmithies,
thank you all for your enquiries about the audition - i've included a little piece about it I wrote for my book, which you may or may not want to read. I exaggerate not. Still waiting to hear if the good bit or the bad bit won.
bobby mc ferrin (sorry tardy response peter) is one of my fave musos of all time, and wrote a song with the words 'thinkin about your body/thinkin about your face' (which involves alot of suggestive body slapping) a recording of which an admirer once left anonymously on my answerphone. eh the good old days when! i highly recommend his albums, especially the early ones! he also works with the very funky cellist yo yo ma and they have made an album together...all very cutting edge and cool and i'm a big fan or was until 'don't worry be happy' (which was the song which was in when i was studying in the USA and brings back very happy memories) got into the charts, and made him so famous that he became watered down.....
meanwhile julian is digging holes and bashing up cast iron baths and piercing pipes and we have no toilet at the mo but the house will be, infact is already, a dream come true!
peter we would love to have you guys to stay and help out with the plumbing (stripping, painting. drinking) over the summer. I am away alot in july and we have various people coming and going but lots of rooms. just give us a ring to talk dates! do you have blow up beds ? julian could do with the support as i am just good at cleaning and cobweb dusting and buying strange things to weld on to pipes.....what fun!
so off i go on me bike, through the poppy fields to the mas en provence to be, to clean more cobwebs. pics coming soon, love, ruthxxxxxxxx

THE AUDITION
I feel nervous anticipation about my audition in Lyon but I am also confident that I am as well prepared as is possible.
I spend the morning riding through periwinkle-spattered lanes on my bike, alone and free to follow any path, which lures me. For sheer colour I spontaneously nestle into the red silk endometrium of Mother Earth, the most intense field of poppies I have ever seen. From it’s interior I watch the flowers nod to the beat of the sunlight and, when a breeze moves them, start up their barmy pogo dance. I take this wild freedom home with me and pack it next to my Bach score in the bag destined for Lyon.
In the car on the way we listen to a cassette of my favourite cellist, Steven Isserlis, discussing Bach’s Fifth Suite. He talks about the crucifixion, the resurrection; about main beats as telegraph poles and the phrases in-between the wires that join them, and above all, the feeling he aims for when performing the Suites; rather than being in a forest deciding which route to take, he is a bird flying above the forest seeing the whole network of paths. This beautiful image I also take, and place next to the poppies, planning to assemble these tokens of inspiration as I rosin my bow in the warm up room a couple of hours later.
I am unbearable in the car, going through the memory of the Bach note by laborious note in my head, and telling Julian, my faithful chauffeur, to shush whenever he makes conversation.
From the moment I arrive, however, everything goes wrong:
I show the doorman at the Opera house the letter indicating the ‘foyer’ where I can ‘chauffe’ myself an hour before the audition, and he shows me to a corridor off the pit. From there I get frightfully lost trying - on escalators that do not work and in red plastic padded cells - to find the harpsichord which, it has been brought to my attention, is tuned especially low for Rameau. When I finally locate it I discover my A is not far off, which means my strings will not slide into another key between the first and second halves of the Allemande, and I am greatly relieved. I unpack my tools (including poppies and bird) and do a calm hour of warm up exercises. I feel good. The door to the auditorium is right there, a mere quaver away. However, the hour of my audition passes and I still have not seen a soul. I have no idea where the noises of other cellists playing the same Allemande at various pitches and tempi are coming from on the loudspeakers - other warm up rooms or the auditions themselves - but I decide to call the director to ask if I am in the right place and she answers from the auditorium where they have all been waiting for 15 minutes. I hurry, button/cello protecting pink silk sheath dangling, music under my sweaty pits, bow hooked precariously over one remaining finger, to ‘the other side on the 4th floor’ wherever that may be. I practically fall into the auditorium, too flustered to take in the polite introductions, and am asked to begin with the solo Bach. I try to centre myself by calling up the bird and play the first chord. The bird has become a cockroach scrabbling at 90 miles an hour through my ‘walking pace’ baroque dance, and dragging me by the fingernails. My heart has decided to take its inspiration from the pogo dance of the poppies rather than the intense colour and I splash clumsily at top speed through the Courante. I am aware my eyes are following my bow-hand and must be whizzing from side to side. I must sound and look horrible. When I reach the finishing line, the harpsichordist walks up, it seems, in slow motion, and plays me an A, which is infact a G flat. It turns out the harpsichord was tuned to 392 after I tuned my cello to it. I try to explain that I was here an hour and a half early to check the tuning and I think they look sympathetic. I make a gesture as if to clean out my ears and begin. Suddenly I am aware that I am playing Boismortier, a 16th century French composer, to French experts in 16th century French music, and that I have no idea about the style. I have never taken lessons on this music and my ornamentation on the repeats – spontaneous whims in my practice room one day as I looked out onto the cherry trees and believed myself to be inspired - seems to evoke winces from the cellist. Meanwhile the conductor is walking out into the hall, presumably to see if he can hear anything at all from anywhere but the front row. He instructs me to play it this way and that: “Play it as if you were the tragic heroine of an opera, full of lament….”; “Play it as if the greatest tragedy had just befallen you and you are full of anger”. Damd. He is right. I am playing it like Amelie Poulat and not Jean d’Arc, but I have to change gear so radically whilst trying to remain receptive to follow his commands and it is like being pulled through a mangle.
I am asked to wait for a half an hour and come back for the ‘dechiffrage’. I know that a ‘bass chiffre’ is a figured bass in French and that is all. I am horror struck that I will be asked to sit at the obscenely low-pitched harpsichord and told to improvise a figured bass. Memories come crowding in of morning meetings at the Menuhin School being asked to get up in front of all the boys my palms were sweating and my acne bursting for and having to “play all the cadences starting on the second degree of the scale”. HELP.
I am shown to the very grand public foyer 15 minutes after Julian has agreed to meet me for a glass of pop in the Opera café. The half hour turns into an hour, sitting with all the other cellists making small talk about the baroque scene in Amsterdam versus London while my mind is still trying to find a less horrific possible meaning to the word dechiffrage.
Finally I am called up. As I re- enter I see that there is a quartet sitting in the pit with a missing link. Me. Ah. Sight-reading! For the next 10 minutes I am in heaven. I am the bird flying through Rameau on the wings of the Musiciens du Louvre. I become red gesture, wild colour, and a dance in the breeze. We are in the music like a big bath. and even if that is the only time I get to play with them I can say that my debut with the Musiciens du Louvre was truly glorious. I could go on forever.
Then it is over. Julian greets me at the stage door with a present of viol music on CD, and after a beer we climb back into the Megane and head back down the A7 to the sunshine. I did it. At least I had the courage to do it.