First orchestra tonight

saying goodbye to Narmina, our rehearsal pianist (in purple)

This afternoon we had quite a long dialogue-only rehearsal, followed by a dinner break and then the first orchestra rehearsal.

Musically it sounded quite good; I actually recognised a number of the musicians from previous projects, but of course it has been at least ten years since I last saw them.  Peter Tiefenbach's re-orchestration of the score is quite good!  He has re-scored the piece a bit to accomodate the size requirements of the Jane Mallet (there is no orchestra pit) but it still sounds very good.  It's always a distraction when the orchestra arrives because part of my mind is listening to the colours and textures, so little mistakes in the staging sometimes creep in, and of course as this was a "wandelprobe" (which means we try things out with the orchestra while moving about the stage) there were lots of stops and starts and skipping over dialogue, which can also get confusing.  But there were no major issues so I hope our dress rehearsal run tomorrow evening goes well...

After Sunday's last piano rehearsal we had Monday off, and I met my parents; they were in town for brief holiday in advance of a business meeting.  So they stopped off here to pick me up and we continued downtown to the Royal York... It's a beautiful hotel that I've not seen much of, apart from one time I sang in a gala performance there with my friends Ellen and Brahm, given for the German club of Toronto, many years ago.

After checking in and dropping off their luggage we went out to enjoy the sunshine and walked toward the theatre, which is located only a few blocks away from the Royal York.  They very generously treated me to lunch in a French bistro called Biff's, just opposite the Sony Centre, and it reminded me a lot of some great lunches and dinners we had out together, during my very first visit to Belgium back in 2004, when they were living and working there, and Maggie and I hadn't even begun to consider moving there...