tears

We have been in Bremen for a week. It was yet another hellish ‘emergency-budget-cut’ journey of which there seem to be more and more: After a night in a hotel on the peripherique of Paris, and a morning’s rehearsal on the other side of the city we were treated to two airline changes and a four hour ride in a worn bus on which my colleagues got understandably blind drunk on vodka.
At one am we rolled into the ‘Innside’ hotel located ‘inside’ an abandoned space park but many kilometres outside Bremen itself. My room looked out onto a parking lot and I was very grumpy about it. And I was tired. We all were.

The programme of Haydn symphonies just wasn’t doing it for me and I was getting worried. In the concert I felt nothing. Nothing. I hardly recognised myself:

“Have I finally become just another muso going through the motions?” I asked myself.

“But I LOVE Haydn!” I countered.

“And what ‘s with my posture? I can’t seem to know where to put my hair. The peg is sticking in my ear. My knees are gripping, my feet slipping…..”

“It’s all in my head”

“Oh my God, I’m having a breakdown”.

I certainly did not want to go there again, feeling like I was ruining every concert.

At the reception I had a lot of Gewurtztramminer.

The hotel was growing on me. I had called ahead of time and, seeing that it was by the river, had requested a riverside room. This, I suppose, is why I got a car-park-side room. However, I asked to change, discovered the sauna, the fruity birchermusli breakfast on the sunny deck and started to recover from the withdrawal symptoms of constant internet access. I was starting to relax.

We have now segued into a programme of Handel and Gluck with Vesselina Kassarova.

Gluck hardly pens an interesting bass line, but Handel is the Original Groove, man, and as soon as we start playing the chaconne I am swinging, riding high on an inner Jacuzzi of joy - and relief that I can feel something after all.

After the chaconne comes an aria from Ariodante in which bassoons croon over violin teardrops and we plop a sparse pizzicato bass…..

All of a sudden my breast is heaving. What IS it about Handel? He is writing an ode to a bloody field, for God’s sake, probably with little lambikins running around in it, and the shoulders of my instrument have become a surface on which gallons of snot and tears are forming a gelatinous pool. I sniff, but the stuff keeps coming, its splash painfully audible in the piannississimo da capo. Luckily the bassoons are asked to mute, so they whip out hankies to stuff in to their instruments and, in between an open G and an open D pizz which I can manage with my left hand, my right hand lurches for their kleenex packet. I manage to blow and wipe up the mess in the remaining free beat before the arco begins. Then I start sobbing all over again.

In the sauna the next day I feel so calm and all of a sudden I remember. Five years ago today we lost our baby. The body remembers and, for once, I am glad it does. I’d much rather have snot all over my cello than lead a numb life.