Went along to the first rehearsal of the War Requiem last night in Queens' Chapel. En route I spotted seven swans a-swimming on the river at Jesus Green; well several were asleep and one was on the bank, but I daresay they could have swum had the need arisen. There seems to be a new influx of swans at the moment after a terrible dearth for the last few months. I suspected for a while that the Council had had them assassinated for untidiness, but according to swan websites juvenile swans tend to congregate together until they're about 3 or 4 years old, at which point they find a mate and have cygnets. So it could be that these are the new teenage swans, although they don't seem to be ned swans as Michael feared, with Kappa wings and Burberry beaks.
It was all go in town by the time I got there as everyone was off to formal hall. It's generally a bad idea to cycle down Trinity St. at the back of seven in the winter, as it's barely lit at all and people dressed in long black gowns are likely to swoop out of the shadows into your path at any moment (I nearly ran over a kind of important looking one, complete with mortar-board, last year).
Anyway, finally got to Queens' and crossed the Mathematical Bridge (held together by Hard Sums and Blu-tac) just behind a couple of chefs in tall white hats who were trying to wrestle that evening's dinner over in a cart thing. I'd never been in Queens' before, but it's very pretty and mediaeval - lots of old red-brick buildings and cloistered passageways. And several very hideous seventies buildings, but you can ignore them. The chapel is also very frilly, in a kind of gothic manner (of a fake, Victorian nature apparently).
The rehearsal went quite well; the conductor looked a bit like Adrian and was very jolly and kept saying "Fab", although with the difficulties brought on by Britten's deployment of the Composition Spiders when writing the War Requiem, very little that I sang could have been described as "Fab" :-)
