I’m sitting third chair again, as our missing section member is back after a half-season off. I miss second chair a bit because I learned so much from sitting with the principal cellist, but I won’t miss the feeling of being on the spot every week.

What was waiting on my music stand: Handel’s Water Music suite (which we played remarkably well for sight-reading; it helped everyone ease back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks off); Haydn’s 99th symphony (E flat major, a frustrating key for me because for some reason I only remember to flatten half of the A notes when I play it); a double violin concerto from Vivaldi’s Estro Armonico (hurrah, Vivaldi!); and a symphony by William Boyce, whom I knew was an English Baroque composer but not much more than that.

It is a wry truth in my house that whenever I have a new Haydn symphony to play, I don’t own a recording to help me familiarise myself with it. He wrote over a hundred of them. I own thirty, with two recordings of the 94th. With our tendency to play the later symphonies and my personal preference for that era of Haydn’s symphony-writing career, one would expect that I would have a good chance of owning whatever symphony we’re to play. But no: every time we begin a new Haydn symphony I have to track a new recording down. This is by no means a hardship; I enjoy Haydn immensely. It’s simply become a sort of running joke. (If you’re a geek and wondering: 1 through 20, 82, 83, 85, 92, 94 (twice), 96, 100, 101, 103, and 104. 80, 81, and 99 will soon join them. I love Naxos.)

As usual, I was simultaneously impressed and frustrated by my sight-reading. Overall I’m not bad, but when I lose the music I’m jarred out of the zone and never quite get back on top of things. Also, it was cold, so no one’s fingers were in top form. For once, I remembered to put my glasses on at the beginning of the night. I hate the folding chairs we have to use in the auditorium; I did something to my hip at the beginning of last weekend and it started acting up again last night after finally healing. I might finally have to look into a wedge cushion for proper support. Folding chairs are evil for cellists because they slope backwards and we have to sit forwards, so there’s a lot of stress placed in the lower back. If you’ve ever taken a really good look at how I sit in concert (yeah, right) you’ve seen that I angle the chair so that I sit on a corner of the seat. It hurts less, because the corners are relatively flat.

Also: Last night we got the numbers for the monies collected at the Messiah for charity. Are you ready for this?

There were two charities. Each charity got over $1700.

Yes, I blinked a lot too. That means the performance brought in almost $3500. How incredible, and absolutely wonderful.