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Read an article about it here.

Tonight the BBC Concert Orchestra is pre-recording a Friday Night is Music Night tribute to Gene Kelly in the wonderful Hackney Empire. The presenter is West End and TV star John Barrowman, no stranger to working with orchestras, but he was completely floored by one of the most common of our “traditions” in rehearsals yesterday, amazed and highly amused by something which is by now common instinct and a standard reaction even to the newest recruit in the orchestra.

We can feel it coming and know that in every programme which celebrates Musicals from stage or screen there will be what is technically called a “Stop Chorus”. This is where the orchestra or rhythm section only plays the first beat of each bar for 8 – 16 bars, the rest being filled by the wonderful sound of highly skilled tap-dancing. In the percussion parts we often spot this well in advance as it will usually fall to us to play an elaborate rhythm on a woodblock , offering a hollow imitation of the real thing, however some arrangements come along deliberately leaving the gaps empty in case there is an available guest performer who can actually tap dance for real. When reading through an arrangement for the first time and coming across such a moment, by beat three of the first empty bar the entire orchestra will be stamping their feet wildly as fast as possible without any attempt at specific rhythms, giving the impression of a highly unskilled herd of tap-dancing hippopotami! This is exactly what happened as we read through an arrangement of “I Got Rhythm” in rehearsals yesterday reducing John Barrowman to helpless laughter – he found it so funny he even asked us to keep it in for the show!

However it is an in-joke and while the audience in the theatre might enjoy the visual surprise, the listeners for the broadcast would be left completely baffled, so after discussion I had with conductor Larry Blank and the producer we’re reviving a little percussion section party-piece which was created for a Prom a couple of years ago.

I know that many percussion players have tried to come up with a better tap dance alternative to the humble wood block and eventually taken perhaps the most obvious route – real tap shoes held and played on a horizontal wooden board. We’ve certainly done this in the BBC CO, but while this achieves the right aural effect, the visual element isn’t usually seen by most of the audience. For the Royal Albert Hall we took this to a new level – the black wooden boards were positioned vertically behind the percussion section and at the stop chorus in the arrangement (42nd Street, naturally!) all six percussionists turned round and crouched down while playing the white tap shoes, mounted on sticks, above our heads. We even had black cloth fitted to the sticks which covered our hands so that the white shoes stood out against the black boards. I had to get hold of several more pairs of tap shoes for this and got them from a company called Dancemania who enjoyed helping make this happen so much that they created their own blog http://www.dancemania.biz/blog/white-tap-shoes-at-the-royal-albert-hall/ all about it which contains photographs, rehearsal video and an audio clip of the moment itself together with the reaction from prommers and the presenter, Katie Derham.

Before the rehearsal this afternoon we’ll rehearse our tap dance moment (just three of us this time) and the sound engineers will make sure they get the best sound for the listeners and hopefully the audience and John Barrowman will enjoy the visual surprise as well. I’ll have to wait until the broadcast to get an audio clip of the piece but once I have one I’ll post it here.

Then in September, along came another operatic opportunity. Not a new piece but the first time I have played the part in Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman Without A Shadow. In the opera the glass harmonica doesn’t play until halfway through the third act, and without giving the plot away, the moment the glasses first play is the moment where the woman gets her shadow – another mysterious and otherworldy moment!

I’ve known about this part for some time as many percussion colleagues have mentioned that they have played it on a vibraphone in place of the real instrument and it was good to be able to let everyone hear how different and distinctive it sounds on the glass harmonica.

The performance was in the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by their Principal Conductor, Vladimir Jurowski. It was not the complete opera however but a series of segments selected and strung together by Jurowski, and to my great surprise at the first rehearsal – no singers! Jurowski wanted to highlight the brilliance of the orchestration and had selected mostly orchestral moments for his segments and from the reviews it seems that this must have been effective for those unfamiliar with the opera but for the opera buffs it was rather frustrating. I loved it though – a huge orchestra onstage and a large brass and percussion group offstage with all of Strauss’s fantastic colours being clearly heard rather than suppressed in the pit.

The glass harmonica part goes off the range of my instrument by one semitone so I had to pinch a top F# off one of my wine-glass instruments and mount it in an accessible position. You’ll spot it here beside the larger bowl which I use to moisten my fingers before playing.

The performance was broadcast live on Radio 3 and here’s the shadow-receiving moment complete with repeating descending figure in octaves on the glass harmonica. Listen out at the end of the opera as well to the shimmering sound of two harps, two celestes and glass harmonica flitting in and out of C major like shadows!

January 13th 2012 7.20 p.m.:  

Phone rings – I was expecting a text from another friend in HK about meeting up the following morning, go to switch it off and then spot the caller’s name- Robin Smith, a terrific rock and pop arranger that I’ve worked with from time to time over the last twenty years, living in Australia as far as I was aware, but perhaps he’s in HK and spotted that I’m around. Decide to answer the phone just in case. He’s not. He mentions a rock legend we’ve both worked with before- ” He’s got a gig in London and wants you to play in the band”. Great, always fun to play with and we’ve performed in some amazing venues including Carnegie Hall in New York.

I hope I’m free -
“When is it?”

“Not sure exactly – were looking at a couple of weeks rehearsal before the gig itself. You’ll need to check the date online- it’s the opening ceremony of the Olympics, do you think you could be free?”

“Whaaaaaat!!??”

“I’ll need to know ASAP as its going to take ages to sort out all the security clearances and also he was really insistent that you were the first person to ask, so we’ve all got our fingers crossed”

Split second decision -
” Of course I’ll do it, I’m sure there’s nothing else going on then.”

“That’s a yes?” “That’s a yes” “Great, he’ll be really pleased – one more thing though, you can’t tell anyone who you’re playing with – it’s strictly confidential”

Knock on dressing room door, time to go onstage- we arrange to catch up over the following couple of weeks and end the call

Show in Hong Kong gets underway in spectacular style and it’s not until I’ve introduced the third piece in the programme and stand to one side as the orchestra plays that the full significance of the call hits me, swiftly followed by extreme panic – I remember that I’m booked to appear at the Aix en Provence festival for three weeks from the end of June, will this clash with the rehearsal period or even the ceremony itself? I have to wait until the interval to check my diary and am relieved to see that the ceremony is on July 27th and I finish in Aix on the 14th. Looks like it could work………!!

July 27th: Well today’s the day, it has worked, arriving back from sunny Aix into soggy London and straight into rehearsals with some old friends and some new ones.

We’ve prepared our individual parts prior to getting together as there was only one rehearsal in the Olympic stadium for us to sort out staging and sound check. Robin on keyboards, Jamie on clarinet and recorders, Luke on guitars and keyboards, Ash on drums and me on all sorts of percussion, all backing a renowned multi-instrumentalist, in a musical sequence put together by him in close collaboration with Danny Boyle himself. Sounds and looks great!

At the first full rehearsal we discover that while we’re playing there will be thousands of performers out on the “Field of Play” and realise that the focus is not just on us, but once we’ve seen what actually goes on we grasp the full significance of the whole sequence- definitely one of the coolest bits of an exceptionally cool ceremony.

Two further dress rehearsals and we’ve now seen much of what’s going to happen, and even had some friends and family in to share the experience but Danny Boyle himself addressed the stadium full of guests and asked/insisted that they ” Save the Secret”. After all the hype of how things couldn’t match up to Beijing on a significantly smaller budget, I have to say that what we’ve seen is sensational and a truly joyous celebration so all sorts of things British, brilliantly conceived and stunningly executed. A privilege and a pleasure to be part of!

Heading onstage in a few hours, enjoying the hospitality and exceptional catering backstage, and looking forward to the build up as the audience start arriving just after 5. There are still significant aspects of the ceremony that have been kept secret from all the performers- the burning question everyone is asking is ” where will the flame be?”

Well all will be revealed very soon in front of an audience of world leaders, sporting legends and an estimated 4 billion TV viewers ( how many people are there in the world- how many TVs??) and I know from texts and emails that I have a significant bunch of chums scattered all over the globe who’ll be hoping for at least a glimpse of me. The wait will soon be over and they’ll all discover that not only am I thrilled to be part of what will be a truly memorable event but I’m delighted once again to be performing with Mike Oldfield.

Yesterday afternoon saw Oxford Town Hall filled to capacity – our first sold out family concert at last! – for an Intergalactic Adventure with the Oxford Philomusica. There were plenty of fantastic costumes – spacemen, aliens, robots – and not just in the audience: one of the horn players was wearing a genuine NASA spacesuit!

We discovered a couple of years ago when we started this series that the full orchestra is too overpowering for the venue so yesterday a mere 26 players took to the stage. I arranged all the music specially and although confident it would work, I was still relieved when we ran the main theme from Star Wars through to begin the rehearsal that there were no issues of balance and that it did indeed sound big and impressive. Full credit to the wind and percussion players who all quickly adapted to the different line up and played in a way that was very considerate to their string colleagues. Even Mars from the Planets still had the necessary menace and shock-factor!

We revealed that our spaceship – the Starship Improvise! – had been designed by Wallace and Gromit before a final countdown (yes, that Final Countdown!) and blastoff into “Space, the final frontier” and the iconic theme from the original Star Trek TV series. Each of the different sections of the orchestra represented a part of our solar system and we picked up a hitchhiker along the way – none other that E.T. the extra-terrestrial. With a little help from a certain Doctor Who we returned safely to Earth and had plenty of adventures to talk about.

All great fun and brilliantly performed by the Oxford Philomusica – thanks everyone!

Next week some of the same pieces come with me to Liverpool for Science Fiction Classics. This is the second family concert this year with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, following our hugely successful Family Film Favourites, and I’m really looking forward to it although there is the slight matter of a whole medley yet to be arranged! I’ve decided that the focus for this concert should be science fiction on the big and small screen. There’s plenty of film music – Star Wars, of course, as well as Little Shop of Horrors and even Time Warp from the Rocky Horror Picture Show – but I’ve decided to include a medley of cult TV science fiction themes, from the 50s to the present day. Today I’ve got to make my final selection and decide whether to present them chronologically or dramatically – I think that the musical sequence might work really well starting with the Twilight Zone anyway so perhaps I’ll just get that one done and see which theme feels right to follow it. The truth is out there, I’m sure!