OK, so I’m jumping on the Steve Jones / Brent Ozar bandwagon of explaining why I’m not attending SQLBits this year…
Why am I not going? Covid.
No, not because I’ve got Covid, or I’m going to have Covid, or am suffering from Long Covid, or caught Covid at the last SQLBits I attended, or am afraid of catching Covid. And yet Covid is still the reason.
Me, 2020, Music, and I
As some of you may know, I’m also a musician of sorts. I play double bass well enough that local orchestras ask me to dep on short notice, and I’ve played in quite a few operas over the years. I even blog about it sometimes as “TheLoneDoubleBass“. I enjoy doing this, I regularly get booked up a year or more in advance for some of these things, and this was the case back in 2020.
The West Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra had, in the years running up to Covid, been putting on occasional semi-staged operas. These have included Traviata, Cavelleria Rusticana, and Cosi Fan Tutte. In 2020, on the last weekend in March (or was it the one before?) we were due to perform Puccini’s “Le Villi”, and the usual final few weeks’ preparation work were well under way.
And then Covid lockdown happened – it kicked in a few days before our performances were scheduled.
Opera’s not a trivial thing to put on – musicians, singers (I love that distinction), venues, everything – it can be complicated to rearrange. People move on – venues move on – and getting things back together takes time.
That time has now passed, and WYSO is putting on another opera that weekend. It was going to be Le Villi, because why not reuse the effort that’s already been put into rehearsing it, but there are issues that make that currently not a viable option, so we’re teaming up with Northern Opera Group to do two performances of Parry’s short opera “Pied Piper of Hamelin”.
So I’m doing that instead.
It’s not the first time I’ve done an opera rather than attending SQLBits, but there’s only so many weeks in the year, and it’s quite often a case of who books me first. And, as I said, I can get booked up for gigs waaaay ahead of time.
So, I hope you all going to SQLBits have a lovely time, and I hope that I can make it next year. Or maybe I’ll be doing a different gig…
The Lone DBA 