By now I have posted essentially all of the videos from the 1981 Yeomen of the Guard. The last three to be put up on YouTube were the Overture, "Night has spread her pall once more", and "'Tis done! I am a bride!" Re the last of these: unfortunately the audio from the pickup rehearsal was unusable, but I
had to include this song. The solution I chose was to make a hybrid of stills taken from the pickup rehearsal of November 12th, 1981, and audio from the actual performance of Saturday November 14th. It is not ideal, but it sort of works. Re the overture: it is not a lot of fun watching a featureless screen while the music plays, so I decided to add some footage of the Tower of London that I took in 2005, along with still photos taken by my wife and myself in 2005 and 2011. Unlike the stills that accompany Diane Duke's solo, the order of presentation of the clips for the overture is not pre-ordained. You might be amused by the following calculation. Suppose the overture were 5 minutes long (it's more like 6), and the accompanying stills or clips were each 10 seconds in length. There would therefore be 30 clips/stills, and the number of possible different arrangements of these is 30 factorial (30!). If one were to try each possible arrangement for, say, one second each, then to run through all possible arrangements would take around 2.65x10^32 seconds, which corresponds to about 6x10^14 times the age of the universe. Fortunately, one can settle on a reasonable sequence of clips a little more expeditiously that that.
We were lucky to be visiting the Tower on a day when they opened the top level of Tower Bridge to the public. Hence there are one or two almost-aerial views of the Tower.
It may be obvious from the movie clips of the Tower that I was using a tripod. This can be a problem in some parts of the world. I still remember being forbidden to take my tripod into some of the ancient sites in Greece (e.g. Olympia), and even in London was told to put it away when I was about to take some video at the foot of the Millenium Wheel. Apparently the dock there is private property. At The Tower of London, the only result of deploying it was that an official can be heard on the sound track asking me if I am a professional videographer. Well, no.
The video of "Night has spread her pall" is indirectly a tribute to the sensitivity of the human eye. On here the result is very murky, but the audience at the time had no problem seeing what was happening on stage - in spite of the simulated night. In general I have been pretty happy with the placement of the microphones in these recordings, but in this chorus piece, one yeoman who enters with an A-flat (to make a B-flat-seventh chord for "Up and down, and in and out") is rather closer to the mic than anyone who sings the B-flat. The result is a little unsettling, especially as you can just hear one of the yeomen selecting his note while the women are still singing their part.
