spain with the RLPO and a spot of Wednesday afternoon Wagner

The Phil will spend 10 days next month performing in San Sebastian, Santander and Santiago and I will be out there for the first few days of the tour.
One thing I'll be missing however is the performance of Wagner's mighty opera Parsifal at Santiago de Compostela, so to get some insight into the piece and to get in the viva espana mood I popped in to RLPO rehearsals this afternoon.
A lot of hard work goes on in orchestra rehearsals, but there's also time for a spot of humour too I discovered as I sat as quietly as I could in the corner of a box.
The RLPO are going to need a fair amount of stamina for the piece which is four and three quarters hours long PLUS two intervals and an estimated finishing time of 1am. That's a Ken Dodd show!
I find rehearsals intensely interesting, not least because it gave me the chance to hear conductor Vasily Petrenko sing! And I can report he has a very good bass-baritone voice.
In fact, he managed to conduct, sing and make mental notes in his head all at the same time which meant after letting the orchestra flow on through several minutes of music (he told me - as he munched his way through fish and chips and a slice of cake during the lunchbreak - that he believes Parsifal the best of Wagner's operas), he still went back to pick them up on a nuance about three bars from where they had started.
"can we calm it down and make it more sticky, more glue in it," he asked on another section, gesturing, well, glueiness.
After listening to half-an-hour of Wagner in the preparation, I'm slightly disappointed I won't hear the finished product.
But there's plenty of music making to enjoy during the tour and I'll be blogging and writing articles regularly to keep everyone up to date with how things are going.