Whose wedding is it anyway? Part one
And… it’s the middle of the wedding season in the shires again, and the last couple of dos have each had an element of ‘who the heck are you?’ about them:
For wedding no 1, I had been phoned a week before by a violinist with whom I used to do irritatingly intense chamber music concerts. Actually, the concerts weren’t too bad but the rehearsals drove me to distraction. The cellist was always at least half an hour late, the violinist was – well – we’ll come to him, and the pianist (with whom I got on the best), was keen to try everything at a tempo slightly faster than the one at which he could actually play all the notes. Anyway – the violinist. When I first came across him, I read his CV before meeting him, and was instantly intimidated. He studied at a top American conservatoire, with legendary teachers and went on to, allegedly, lead various UK and European orchestras, etc etc. And then I met him, and it didn’t take too long for me to realise that actually, I had nothing to be afraid of. Aside from being a fairly average, and annoyingly quiet player, he’s got one of those odd senses of humour, which means that he doesn’t get any of the silly jokes that are bandied around in rehearsals until about 2 hours later, whereupon he will repeat them with glee for the rest of the session, and every time he sees the person who made them from then on.
So – he’d booked me for this wedding gig, and I said yes because the Hyperactive Mountaineer was due to have a friend staying that weekend so that they could do some hyperactive mountaineering. I left plenty of time to get to the seaside resort town where the wedding was due to take place, it being an August Saturday in a popular resort, and got to the rather shabby looking hotel after a 3 hour trip which, out of season, would have taken an hour and a half.
The rest of the quartet were already there and I was glad to see that the cellist was a bloke I’d met before whilst depping in one of the classier local quartets. The second violin was a name that I knew but I face I’d never met so we spent a little while unsuccessfully trying to work out why we’d never met before when we used to live in the same county.
A quick look through the pad for the civil ceremony gave me a bit of a flavour of the couple’s musical tastes. Pachelbel to come in, Wedding March to go out, and then Shania Twain for the signing of the register. Whilst guests were arriving, there was a chosen selection, including Lloyd-Webber, Whiter Shade of Pale and a few Beatles numbers with slightly tricksy rhythms if you haven’t played them before. It soon became clear that our violinists knew none of the pieces of music in the pad (mysterious, since the first violinist had assembled the music – but he claimed that he’d spent so long putting it in order that he didn’t have time to practise it), and so viola & cello became ‘Popular Culture Advisory Corner’. Every piece was preceded by “So – do you know this piece? No? – OK – we’ll count you in from here”
So – the ceremony came, the groom looked terrified, and the bride’s family looked fierce. Cellist and I had a whispered speculation as to whether there might be the hint of a shotgun about the whole thing, or whether the bride had just chosen a less than flattering frock. The registrar broke the vows up into teeny, tiny bite size chunks for the couple to repeat when she realised that they might not manage too many words at a time, but still there were problems. The most entertaining problem came when the registrar said “I, Darren Lee Smith…”, to which the groom replied “Sorry – could you repeat that?” and the registrar muttered “Well OK – it’s only your name but… ‘I, Darren Lee…
Between the ceremony and the reception, playing in a bar smelling of old beer, I checked my phone for a signal. Nothing. So I checked the iPod and immediately plugged into the hotel wifi. I sent a ‘Help! I’m trapped’ email to my usual first violinist, apologising for anything bad I’d ever said to him and promising never again to whinge about his breakneck speeds. And then I went back to plotting with the cellist against the dopey violinists we were faced with today.