Delicacy

After last night's concert rehearsal, which dragged on from 6 until 11pm with a short break for food, we were glad to have a break today. Up into the wooded Vercors mountains past unfurling, month-late leaves; up to the crags and the torrents, swollen by this winter's rain, the late snow-melt and the huge thunderstorm we had last night; up past Pont-en-Royans village with its seven-storey houses perching on rock and overhanging the river; up to the bare limestone cliffs around Choranche and the waterfall so full that it bounced metres off the rocks it was tumbling down. Here, 140 years ago, local people discovered magnificent caverns containing icy green-blue lakes and the most delicate stalactites I have ever seen. I stopped listening to our guide and just looked - they created a different shape with each step. There were also superb stalactites and stalagmites of the sort I've seen before but these fine, long tubes hanging from the ceiling seemed to be made of an impossible combination of falling water and stone. In caverns where the water was dripping through a fissure there were curtains of them (though not as long as these). And everywhere was the sound of the underground river crashing over rocks and filling the lakes. Our guide thought the pièce de resistance was a son et lumière in the final cavern. Most definitely requiring resistance - a ten minute splurge of plinky music and lava lampery projected onto a wall of stalagmites with the occasional purple or green light on some small feature. Insane, in a place that more than speaks for itself.

Back to a rehearsal and the first concert of Haydn's Seasons. We were good. The two choirs complement each other and the orchestra of musicians from Grenoble and Oxford helped us along when we made the occasional mistake. If the audience noticed they didn't seem to mind.


Black and white in colour 19