Diary of a music competition judge

Monday (21 September): to St John’s Smith Square for the opening night of the London International A Cappella Choir Competition, which happens to coincide with the 2,000th concert of the Tallis Scholars, broadcast live on the BBC. This is a coincidence, since when we planned the event a year ago it was far from hitting precisely that round number. The inevitable reshuffling of dates since then has come out in favour of veracity, not that anyone but me, the keeper of the database, would have known. Or cared, probably.

It is a big occasion which we made all the harder for ourselves by having to travel back that same day from a show the previous evening in Barcelona; and then choosing to sing a devil of a mass by Sheppard for the first time. I am too distracted to enjoy the music-making fully, twice suffering from the kind of mental incapacity that jetlag visits on people, this being a very brief but total gap in the flow of one’s concentration.