Lift up your heads!

I have been having a kind of singing marathon last week.
Wednesday: recording session with the choral ensemble Les Métaboles
Thursday: dress rehearsal for Messiah with Choeur Varenne
Friday: première of Messiah
Saturday: voice tuition.

Luckily, I now get to rest until next Thursday and Friday when Choeur Varenne will give Messiah at Saint Germain des Prés Church in the centre of Paris.

The lesson I have learned is in the title of this post.

Lift up your heads to look at the conductor during the recording: it looks better on video.

Lift up your heads to look at the conductor during the dress rehearsal and concert: the church accoustics at Maisons Laffite where we first gave Messiah were very good for the choir as we could hear all the voices. However, the conductor said she could not hear us tenors because we were all at the back. We had to look at her and anticipate all her moves rather than just follow her: tricky.

Lift up the head of the palate inside the mouth to get a clear "o" sound; mine always tends to go off compared with other vowels and I have to pay particular attention to my Os.

I look forward to the concerts this coming week.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates
Messiah, G.F. Haendel.
The English Concert and Choir, Trevor Pinnock, Archiv Produktion

I'm on the top of the world

I was most fortunate to be invited by my friend and fellow singer Eric Cogniat in his chalet in the French Alps for a few days of skiing. In the village of Puy Saint Vincent, to be exact.

Big hearty breakfasts in the morning. Skiing all day with a midday break at the altitude restaurant to try out the local specialties (rabbit in mustard sauce or cabbage sausage). Home-cooked dinner by Eric's partner Emmanuel, me or whoever else felt like using the kitchen: cheese fondue, nouvelle cuisine, traditional French five-course meal, leftover smorgasbord, chocolate mousse, banana cake, carrot cake...

It was grand, including the view from the summit.


Top of the world
The Carpenters, Carpenters Gold, Universal

Now we've had our fruit salad today

Producers of red wines are always advertising the wonderful fruity flavours one can discover by drinking their wares. I have had a complete fruit salad experience over the course of two meals with just one wine.

First, I was delighted to host my old friend from agronomics school Bastien and his girlfriend Oz last Sunday night. I had prepared pears poached in wine for pudding. Because I knew I was going to use the wine for cooking, I did not purchase the most expensive wine I could find in the supermarket. I selected a bottle of red Cheverny from the Loire region; a blend of Gamay, Cabernet and Pinot noir grapes. "Very fruity", said the label. The wine had been poached with the pears, sugar, half a vanilla pod and cinnamon powder. Left over in our bowls was a deliciously sweet and light wine syrup, which in the mouth gave out pear and vanilla aromas slowly replaced by lingering cinnamon. However, these flavours were obviously those of the other ingredients cooked in the wine.

On the following Wednesday, I finished the leftover wine with my simple dinner of soup, salad, cheese platter and lemon tart but I was quite astonished to discover completely new and diverse flavours from this rather inexpensive wine.

Drunk alone, it was not particularly memorable, suitably fruity as advertized.
Along with fresh goat's cheese, the berry side came out while accentuating the "goaty" flavour of the cheese. Together with a more mature creamy goat's cheese, the mix reminded me of ripe apples. The real surprise came with the very creamy Camembert. I was expecting the wine to highlight the pungent cheese but instead it mellowed the taste of the Camembert into a cherry-flavoured cream! Finally, with the lemon tart, the wine gave hints of almond paste.

What a fruit salad! All that from just one bottle. Or perhaps I had just been rather too generous with the rhum for my piña colada before the meal...

Fruit salad
The Wiggles, Wiggles tribute - The greatest hits, BSA Media

Drinking is good for you

This evening, I have sung for the first time in concert with the small vocal ensemble Les Métaboles, which I joined last September. It had been somewhat frustrating up to now as I had missed two previous concerts because of my travelling, although just rehearsing with the group had been very fulfilling.

We just gave a world premiere of Dimitri Tchesnokov's Concerto for Piano and Choir. The composer was at the piano and we were the choir. It is a very beautiful piece, reminiscent of the greatest Russian tradition: Mussorgsky and his musical frescoes with chorus, Shostakovitch and his piano fugues. In addition, a touch of Liszt for the virtuoso piano.

The words of the chorus part are rather desperate: a man so disillusioned by life the only thing he wants is salvation from God and vodka, lots of vodka to forget it all. It all ends in drunken abuse. Luckily, it is all in Russian, so hopefully not many people in the audience understood what we were saying...


No drinking before the concert! The piece was so difficult to master we had to be very concentrated to sing it well. However, after the concert, while I was enjoying a glass of red wine with a friend who had come to listen to us, I saw a group from the choir toast our achievement with the composer in the same bar. I joined them later.

I hope we get to sing this beautiful piece again.

Vodka
Korpiklaani, Karkelo, Nuclear blast

Warm my mind near my gentle stove

Back in Paris, I jave just moved into a new apartment, which was custom-designed and renovated for me by a designer friend of my mother's, Afshin. His partner Kevin did all the woodwork.

Although the living space is limited in small Parisian apartments, I have chosen to keep the original separate kitchen so as to have a real kitchen in which to enjoy cooking. Thanks to Afshin & Kevin's intelligent design, I have managed to fit all my cooking utensils and larder items into a kitchen only a third the size the one I had in Bangkok. Furthermore, I still have next to three square meters of flat working space, a big sink and a real stove.


The stove is very modern, with electronic beeping and all. I am still discovering how to operate all the fancy cooking programmes. The German brand is obviously extremely reliable. However, it does not feature cooking tips for one of my favourite week end meat cuts: grilled duck wing confit from my native Southwest of France.

I have prepared one last night using the cooking tips for roasted chicken wing but the result was not perfectly grilled and crunchy as it should have been. I will try again next week by tweaking the preset programmes.

Soul kitchen
The Doors, The very best of The Doors, Rhino/Elektra

Alone on the hill

I am visiting my parents in Chile and taking the opportunity to visit some of the tourist sights in the country.


What has struck me most were the stunning views from the various mountains throughout the country: a real feast for the eyes.


Here are some examples taken from dawn to dusk in the Atacama Desert region in the North of the country.


In a rather strange fashion, all the food I have ordered in the restaurants of the touristy village of San Pedro de Atacama were also beautifully ornate. Sadly, I find the taste of most Chilean food to be a bit bland.



The fool on the hill
The Beatles, 1967-1970 (Blue), Apple Records

Requiem aeternam: International Federation of Agricultural Producers

I was shocked to learn yesterday from a former staff member that, after 60 years of existence, the International Federation of Agricultural Producers had been liquidated last November by a French court. The Federation had gone through severe financial problems.

IFAP was a forum of discussion between farmers' organisations. Cooperation between farmers in industrial and developing countries, working comitees on regional and emerging global issues, compiling technical guidebooks for producers, voicing the viewpoint of agricultural producers in international policy-making fora: these were the very useful functions of IFAP.

IFAP's website contains useful material for those interested in the viewpoint of farmers on international agricultural policies. The website is still live for now. How long does it take for a provider to erase all content when its bills are no longer paid?

The lesson I ponder today: the current efforts of some public libraries to save and archive Internet content for future generations is very useful in cases like IFAP's where a knowledge institution disappears.

Requiem aeternam
Chant corse - Manuscrits franciscains, Ensemble Organum - Marcel Pérès, Harmonia mundi

Photo: IFAP